"Natural" history of an IPL question

A friend who submitted a question after my most recent post kindly forwarded me the answer to his question (I don't get to see very many answers in their final form, as they are sent to users). And in talking to him about the process, I realized that there isn't really a description of the natural history of an IPL question in one place. Students who answer IPL questions have some perspective, and Reference Administrators and Senior Reference Administrators (and IPL staff and researchers) understand the whole process, but users certainly don't get the whole thing.

So here are a few of the steps an IPL question goes through; I'll finish up in my next post.

1. The Form

First, the form. Adults enter their questions on the adults' form; kids under 13 on the kids' form. The user enters a lot of information about the question--but not everything.

2. The Subject

But the subject of the question is set automatically--it's the first 60 characters of the text of the question. This can cause problems, because the subject of the question is the first thing (often the only thing) that a student considering answering a question sees.

Take my friend's question as an example. He asked a fascinating, complicated question. But like a lot of people (but not everyone), he realized that a real person would be looking at and answering his question. So he included a lot of social language at the beginning of his question. For example (and I'm making this up): "You know, I would find it really interesting to know how many professional football players have died from heart attacks during practice or games." But that would leave QRC (the database which processes IPL questions and in which IPL questions are stored) to make the following as a subject: "You know, I would find it really interesting to know how man". Oops! Hard for an IPL student to know what to make of this question.

3. The Reference Administrator

Here's where the Reference Administrator (often abbreviated "Ref Admin" or "RA") comes in. The Ref Admin is supposed to do a number of things. First, the Ref Admin determines if the question should be rejected for any one of a number of reasons. If answering the question (for example) requires legal, medical, or tax advice, asks more than one question (unless the same sources will answer all the questions), is in a foreign language or asks a question that has to be answered in a foreign language, the question gets rejected.

Assuming that the question is accepted, the RA also decides which of two categories the question will be assigned to: factual or sources questions. The RA sends an acceptance email to the user, and transfers the question to the correct category.

But the most important task the RA accomplishes is to rewrite the subject of the question, if necessary. And it is almost always necessary, unless the question is so short that the subject caught it all.

Okay, that's enough for right now. Next post I'll finish up and talk about the students' role and question review and inactivation.