Should political discussions be allowed in this forum?

[arabarra]

Hi all

Recently there was some discussion in the forum about political issues. As moderator, I have been pondering on how suitable it is for a language forum. It is sure a good thing that everybode can express their opinion, and enrich each other's points of views and so on, but the negative side is that the presence of this kind of arguments can discourage language interested visitors. And that is the actual focus point of this forum, while websites were basque politics can be discussed count themselves by millions.

For this reason I would like to ask you about your views on this issue: Do you think politically oriented threads of discussion should be accepted, or rather politely indicated that Unilang is not the right place to present them?

adeitsu
Arabarra

[pep2]

I´m very interested in the political situation in the Basque Country but this is a language forum and I think it should remain so

(but then a gain: linguistics -and specially socio-linguistics- are not that far away from politics. For instance when someone says that spanish is the common language of all spaniards aren´t they being politic?)

[loqu]

pep2, yes they are

Arabarra, I understand your concerns here. And I think I must agree that one of the good things of this forum is that language is treated independently of politics.

I guess a couple of alternatives may be:

1) Having one single thread about politics and not allowing to speak of politics out of that one.
2) Moving any political thread about Basque to the Politics & Religion subforum. That one has some restrictions on the kind of people who may intervene (to avoid trolling), but the bad thing is that everyone will see the thread and be tempted to give their opinion even if they don't care much about the topic.
3) Leave it as it is now.

I can't decide which option I like the most.

[kalemiye]

pep2, yes they are

Arabarra, I understand your concerns here. And I think I must agree that one of the good things of this forum is that language is treated independently of politics.

I guess a couple of alternatives may be:

1) Having one single thread about politics and not allowing to speak of politics out of that one.
2) Moving any political thread about Basque to the Politics & Religion subforum. That one has some restrictions on the kind of people who may intervene (to avoid trolling), but the bad thing is that everyone will see the thread and be tempted to give their opinion even if they don't care much about the topic.
3) Leave it as it is now.

I can't decide which option I like the most.

I think I would go for the second option you proposed. Let's keep the language forums clean of non-language related topics.

[arabarra]

Hi all,

according to what the majority of the contributing members of the forum propose, I´ll move to a special topic ("Political discussion") all the posts that wish to discuss political issues.

I understand that Unilang aims to provide tools for exchanging views and opinions about language issues. This ressource is much more rare than forums to expose political views at ease. There are millions of the latest, and only one Unilang, so we will try to keep it alive.