Recently there's been a spate of questions asking about Russian etymologies. Each question seems to come from a new user who never posts again, but all the questions are basically in the same format.
What's going on with this? And is it something we should do something about?
This must be a single person who asks low-quality questions which get downvoted, and this triggers an automatic question ban.
Numerous fake accounts are needed to evade that ban.
The Mods should check the cross-IP activity and, if it confirms that these accounts are sockpuppet accounts, burn them with fire.
Yes, probably there is a need for taking some measures. As a moderator of Русский язык, I am well acquainted with the situation as these questions had at first been presented on our site until I closed them all. It is difficult to understand why the person who is asking them uses different accounts here because on Русский язык he uses a single profile. I recommended local moderators to pay attention to all these fake accounts controlled by the man in question, but it seems that this was fruitless.
The reason I used to close the questions like 'Does Russian пушка share the same root with English porch?' is
Please provide the phonetic laws you used to suggest these words to be cognate. Failing that, we cannot help you.
Maybe you should try something like that.
I've re-opened a couple of the questions asked by those possible sockpuppets, not because I appreciate these machine-gun etymology questions, but because the reason given is usually "off-topic: Language-specific grammar and usage questions are off-topic unless primarily concerned with linguistics rather than usage".
These questions are primarily about etymology, which is definitely part of linguistics, and they are generally about the relatedness of words in at least two languages, so I think it's a bad precedent to consistently close them on those grounds: well thought-out (or even half-well thought-out) etymology questions should be allowed in my opinion, and I guess the reason this closing reason is chosen is that they are allowed as there isn't a closing reason that is actually appropriate.
It's possible to vote for closing a question as "other" and then add a comment. Some comments have mentioned there seems to be an almost complete lack of research behind this question (and I'd say the poster is basically picking pairs of random words that sound vaguely similar and just asking ahead), so maybe people who want the questions closed should simply give a reason of this sort.
Does it even make sense to close them in the first place, though? If the questions are on-topic and would generally be appropriate for the site, except for the fact they're machine-gun questions of an identical type that show no prior research and are posted by apparent sockpuppets, then to me, it makes more sense to downvote the questions to death, and hopefully manage to ban the sockpuppets.
There is one user who seems to have created six login ids to ask the same kind of questions! I'll open a new meta discussion on what to do about etymology.
