Should more guidelines by put into place regarding topics?

[Nyril]

More and more, it feels like the purpose of the Creationism vs Evolutionism board is to send us all on searches for articles to post at one another. One person posts one argument taken from another website, and the typical response is to post the rebuttal to that argument (usually from TO).

I'd like to suggest that any topic which is clearly not a product of the author be either removed or locked, and reserve the forum for actual questions on the topic from the members of this board. As interesting as it is to refute the same claim on a number of boards with the same resource, I think it would greatly increase the qualify of debate on this forum if such a rule was in place.

For example, we would see less of threads like:

Question 1: The Fossil Record
Question 2: Natural Selection
Question 3: Detecting Design
Question 4: Molecular Machines
Question 5: Testability

Which are very clearly taken directly from another author, and more threads like:

Should Creationism be taught in classrooms?
Evidence for your beliefs
Light, stars, and creationism
The reality or otherwise of Common Descent

As for the criteria to determine the validity of an argument, I feel that some of the more obvious ones eliminate themselves (Topics in which none of us have even the slightest idea of what we're talking about, so it turns into an article war).

Now, I'm not trying to eliminate all the posts here, but simply make it so this is more meaningful then "I've got more articles on my side then you do, naa naa", which seems to be more and more the standard for topics.

[otseng]

Could you rename your subject to "Should more guidelines by put into place regarding viable topics?" This is more descriptive of your post than "Is this sub-forum productive?" The latter question does not further constructive comments for this subforum, however, the former does. Thanks.

Now, in regards to the former question, perhaps more restrictions should be placed here. For some reason, some of the most heated debates on the entire site are here in C vs E. And additional guidelines might be considered for this subforum to enforce civility. Actually, I have already posed this question to the moderators, but it would be interesting to see what the members at large have to say about this.