Too much power given to the moderators on Skeptics

Question

Why are the moderators doing waht they want? E.g. the delete 4 paragraphs of my question, remove youtube link and after pointing at that wrong behavior they put the url back and write their own question.

If scientific method is removing all background information from the question, then you are not scientific at all.

What's the purpose of user asking question, if they change the question completely?

I have problem with this question and a moderator who acted on it:

I think he should stop censoring the questions like mine. Currently the question looks like this (it was written by the moderator from A to Z, btw):

I have seen this episode about religion from the documentary series "Through the Wormhole" and how it is disappearing and they say that it will have only 10% theists in New Zealand by 2050. Is this true?

You can view the documentary on YouTube and they discuss the subject at about the 23 minute mark.

And this is how it was before the changes (I know there are grammatical mistakes, I am not a native English speaker, however, if bad English is the reason for attacking a user then it's very unprofessional and childish):

I have seen this episode about religion from the documentary series "Through the wormhole" and how it is disappearing and they say that it will have only 10% theists in New Zealand by 2050.

How could they predict something like that?

Because it's like with classical music. You would say, well it's so old, no radio play classical music nowadays, but still, there are very many people who like classical music and I would say that there will be a lot of people who like classical music even in 2050.

Here is the document. they talk about this subject at about 23rd minute:

http://youtu.be/qrIq5xd8nBM?t=23m

How could they predict such thing? Is this for real?

Do they include the rise of nationalism and patriotism all over the world, what about the economic situation, do they know that in Europe and all over the world the number of jobless people are increasing? Do they know that these people are connected. what about new types of religions that are emerging like Scientology etc.?

It seems these "predictions" are:

A) very unprofessional and unscientific

or

B) with a hidden agenda

Through the wormhole is one big disapointment. Unlike Cosmos or The Universe series it has so much speculation and charlatans in every episode that's degrading science in general.

i am not against anybody. Wheather it is a theist or atheist or agnostic or whatsoever, however, these speculative notions in such popular documentaries are putting them in one bag with Beverly Hills 90210.

UPDATE: There was an edit suggesting to remove my subjective question if this could be an atheist propaganda. But I disagree because I think that many anti-religious movements are distorting facts to their liking. So, I will ask if you think that this is an Atheist propaganda or not.

He even removed the youtube link after the second revision, so it shows that the moderators need to have:

a) more responsibility

or

b) be more controlled by others (moderators, users etc.)

Right now the moderators are in my humble opinion misusing their power as could be seen from these links:

Where is the skepticism?

What is with the Zionist censorship of skeptics.se?

Too much censorship in this community?

https://skeptics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2653/why-has-sklivvz-locked-my-perfectly-reasonable-questions-on-evolution

Are moderator decisions too hard to challenge?

P.S. Moderators please add the tag "censorship" to the tags for the question (I am not 300 points and above right now). I think that even people who are not the ruling class on this forum could be able to use the right words. Thank you.

Answer 1

I had a look through the edit history and I think the confusion stems from edit number 5 where rob made the text "view the documentary on YouTube" link to the YouTube video rather than having a raw URL after that text. Articuno also heavily edited the question by culling all the speculation so that it focuses strictly on just the notable claim.

Note that rob and Articuno are not a moderators but have powers of editing without review that come with reputation. You too will attain those privileges at 2,000 reputation.

In edit number 9 you actually removed the link. rob put it back in edit number 10 and you removed it again in edit number 11.

OddThinking's only edit was to change the title from:

Religious people in New Zealand in 2050 will be only less than 10%

to

Will only 10% of the New Zealand population be religious by 2050?

Answer 2

Further to both Ladadadada's answer, and my private moderator message to you explaining how you could escalate your concerns:

• I repeat that I did not edit your post, except to make the title grammatical.

• I did post a comment, warning against continuing the edit war. When it continued, I took action to rollback the damage, lock the question and contact you.

• There was no censorship by moderators. There was editing by the community to focus the question. I personally support those edits and editors.

• There is no guarantee that your words will be left unedited; this is like a Wiki in that respect. Please read the license for more.

Answer 3

1. Your link to the video has not been removed. It is still there.

2. What you are trying to do is to include your own reasoning into the question. If you think you already know the answer, then you can answer your own question, that is not prohibited. Otherwise what you call "background information" is in fact irrelevant to the question. The question is "is the claim true?". What you think about the claim does not change the validity of the claim. Compare these:

   Version1:

   I heard that blah is blah. Is this claim true? I think it is totally nonsense. I heard a lot of stuff which doesn't support it and it seems like it's not right. This is all government agenda and atheist propaganda...

   Version 2:

   I heard that blah is blah. Is this claim true?

   Basically, the edit to your question was equivalent to what I did above. If you think that the question itself has changed, please say exactly how the answers to your initial question would be different to the new version.

3. Keep in mind, this is a Q&A site, not a forum. If you want to discuss things or ask open-ended questions, this is not a good place for it. Because it is a Q&A site, the question you post must be... a question, not a discussion topic, not call for reason, not the way of expressing your own opinion. In fact, the less of your opinion is present in question (or answer for that matter), the better. It is also collaborative effort, so you should be prepared to see your questions and answers edited. Content on StackExchange doesn't belong to you - it belongs to community and is improved (i.e., by editing) by the community (not only moderators).

4. If you don't agree with something, formulate your position in a clear way explaining how exactly the actions of editor(s) are wrong. Just saying "This question is totally different!" will not lead you anywhere. To me, it looks the same. You haven't shown any effort to prove otherwise. If you have arguments, present them, this is the only way to convince people here.

Answer 4

This is a question about the site's standards, not censorship. The moderators and other users (including me) have only been trying to keep the content on this site in line with its standards.

If you disagree with those standards, that is a legitimate point of debate, but the editing that has been done to your post is content-neutral. Editorializing and unreferenced speculation and opinion that you had in your original post would have been removed from any question, regardless of the nature of the speculation.

Whether we call the predictions "very unprofessional and unscientific", "with a hidden agenda", "very reliable and compelling", "unbiased", "biased", the question is still improved by trimming to simply stating the claim and asking for its examination.

Similarly, we don't care whether you call Through the Wormhole "one big disappointment" or "the best thing you've ever watched". In either case, the question is improved by removing that subjective description.

That is a content-neutral standard, and not censorship.

Answer 5

We generally try to avoid loaded statements in questions. While questions don't have to be entirely sterile and neutral, they also should not be more inflammatory than necessary. One example is that we generally avoid calling something a scam in questions, we edit to focus on whether the specific claims are true. The part about "atheist conspiracy" in your post is such a superfluous, but inflammatory part that should be, and was edited out.

Meta commentary on posts is also not appropriate, this is true for the whole SE network. If you disagree with an edit, adding commentary on that to the body of your question is the wrong way to handle this.

You also added a significant amount of irrelevant stuff disparaging the documentary, which was also edited out according to our policy.

In the form you posted and edited the question it is simply inappropriate for this site. That is why it was edited and later locked. The moderators and users involved in this simply enforced the rules of the site. If you disagree strongly with the rules, either try to convince the community to change them, or simply don't use this site.