10K+ rep users: Would you please help me clean up these closed questions with your delete votes?

Question

Fellow 10K+ rep users (and willing moderators):

The following query displays non-migrated, unanswered questions closed as other than duplicate that have not yet been deleted from the site. The query currently yields 28 questions.

I'd like to ask for your help in deleting those questions by exercising your vote-to-delete privileges. I have voted to delete the first bunch already and will continue once my delete votes replenish.

I restricted my query to unanswered closed questions because those are low-hanging fruit we can concentrate our votes on. We could examine other low-quality closed questions next, perhaps.

If you unearth any other low-quality, closed questions that you think should be deleted, please post them here in a community wiki answer in order to attract the necessary delete votes. We can keep this question open as an ongoing effort. Thank you!

Answer 1

It's a great idea to be cleaning up old questions that should never be answered, thank you!

I think we should be careful about being too aggressive with this, though. The query picked up a number of quite recently closed questions, including several that are still new enough to be described as "on hold" instead of "closed". That language is deliberate, to encourage the askers to think that there is a way back for their question by editing.

Many of the questions still look unsalvageable to me despite that, but in the particular case of What Capital Gains are owed for a Non-resident owning stock in US C corporation when it is acquired?, I think deleting it was wrong so I've undeleted it for now. We can always delete it again if necessary.

In particular, it's only two days old, had been edited since being closed, and has now gathered two reopen votes. Personally I also think it should be reopened but I'm not sure if I should cast a binding vote to that effect. Either way, I think for now it should still be visible on the site.

I'd suggest that in general we don't delete any "on hold" questions unless they are obviously unsalvageable, as per the definition of "very low quality".

For older questions, the "Stack Exchange roomba" should clean up a lot automatically. For the closed questions being targeted here, anything with a score of 0 or less will be deleted after 9 days of being closed or last edited. A lot of the ones you identified had score 1, so one option would have been to nudge them to be cleaned up organically with a downvote.

Personally I think it would be great if the community as a whole would get involved in keeping the site clean, either by downvoting or voting-to-delete these old questions. Posts like yours are a great way to identify things they should be looking at.

If we have more eyes reviewing old stuff we might perhaps catch the odd one that is worthy of some further attention. For the ones that did manage to get an upvote in the past, someone must have thought them worthwhile.

The more people we have getting involved in running the site, the more smoothly it should run, with the elected mods as "human exception handlers" for the less routine cases.