Member discussion on Closed vs Deleted

Question

I am resurrecting a discussion of Closed vs Deleted. It seems that there was consensus some time ago, as these questions showed:

Deleting Closed Question of No Value is not happening (Oct '11) - This question actually addresses the reasons to delete, Off Topic (almost always delete). And other examples followed.

Deleting Closed Questions (Dec '13) - Which, interestingly, begins "Deletion of closed questions is not happening to the extent required." No answers were offered, but a member commented and agreed with the effort.

The purpose here, now, is to get a pulse of members' thoughts on this. The CM statement on the status "closed" is that it's a limbo state, during which time a question is a candidate to improve for potential reopen, or to be deleted if the reopen never happens.

Recently, there has been objection to the deletion of questions that may have had 'good' answers that were highly voted. This, of course, forces the question of whether a 'bad' question (say off-topic) can somehow be turned valuable by a well crafted answer.

In Dec '16, we had the Meta question How do we discourage high-rep users from answering questions that are clearly off-topic? which gives a nice list of examples of this happening. In one case, the question is voted +68, and the top answer +148. To be clear, I'd be just as happy to see the question edited and voted open. If it's closed, it's closed for a reason.

I would like to hear from members on both sides, those who would look at the Meta posts I linked and agreeing with that, have no objection to continued deletions, as well as those who would prefer otherwise.

Answer 1

I'm in two minds on this.

On the one hand, it seems unfriendly to delete content that people have written, generally in good faith.

On the other hand, I do think off-topic questions clutter up the site, and also encourage more of the same to be posted. Mostly they get high votes because of HNQ, and I don't think the votes actually reflect the quality.

So I'm just going to sit on the fence for now :-)

Answer 2

Should more effort go into reopening some of the closed questions?

I've been mulling this conversation over for a while. We have two conflicting problems that we're trying to reconcile here. We want to keep the site clean, but there are some questions that might be salvageable with some effort. We close questions that are off-topic knowing that with effort the questions could be improved and reopened. It takes time and effort to edit a question to be a better fit for this site. Whose responsibility is it to make those edits?

The OP (the most motivated party who wants an answer) often a new user asking that doesn't have enough context about what is on-topic to make the edits. They are easily discouraged and they're not terribly invested, so the level of abandonment is high. We have some responsibility to be nice and to point them in the right direction, but that's often not enough.

The invested user base (anyone with enough rep to vote to close or reopen) sees an ever increasing volume of low quality questions and probably make some close votes in a reactionary way. Arguments might sap motivation, etc., but the core users can and should be doing the bulk of the work here. Still we are all volunteers, all we can do is ask for help.

The moderators have to deal with flags, spam, and everything else that crosses the site and there are fewer of them. As far as I'm concerned they should be calling balls and strikes when arguments break out, and doing cleanup that can't be done by high rep users.

In the end, some questions are closed that could be salvaged with some effort, but if that effort is not made, they probably shouldn't hang around forever.

I have dozens of deleted posts, and I started looking through them today to see if there were any I still cared about. I found a few, but not many. There were some poorly written questions that I answered that were closed, and I didn't put any effort into getting them reopened. That was my bad, and I probably should have acted before they were deleted. If I put the effort into answering a question that I felt was close enough to on-topic, I should put in the edits required to make the case for reopening. So my final conclusion is that the majority of the responsibility for editing a question to make it unambiguously on topic is:

The answerers who are often high-rep users who are interested enough in the topic to spend some time answering. If they're motivated enough to provide an answer, they should also put some effort into advocating for the asker.

I believe that if we put some effort into encouraging high-rep users to own the questions they answer, we'll have fewer questions with good answers staying closed long-term.

If no one puts the effort in to reopen them, should they be deleted?

Generally, yes. With probably a few exceptions.

Most of them have probably been abandoned. Unless someone is willing to put in the effort needed as discussed above, new answers with updated information cannot be added, so even if the information in the answers was good (though off-topic) they may become outdated, and again, the motivation appears to be lower to maintain content on questions that are closed.

Answer 3

I think that closed questions that have been closed sufficiently long should be deleted. Unless there's a specific, case-by-case reason for them being kept open ("historical" reasons, usually), if a question is closed because it's not a good question or not a good fit for the site, it should be deleted.

It seems like this is more a question of 'should we close as much as we do', then I'll tend to fall on the side of 'keeping more questions open', though I tend to think we do okay on that front for the most part. Either way, though, that's a different discussion than delete/not delete closed questions.

Keeping closed questions around for long enough for people to have expressed opinions on their closed status and then not deleting them afterwards just means we have more examples of poor questions on the site; it's not likely to be found by anyone (since it's not indexed) and not likely to be reopened at that point.

Answer 4

I understand, philosophically, the idea that old, closed questions should be deleted. However, the issue that we have on our site is that there is a lot of controversy on a lot of closed questions. We don't have agreement right now on what should be closed and what shouldn't.

The system, in general, is biased towards closing questions. It takes at most 5 votes to close a question. (Often questions are closed with fewer than 5 votes.) While questions are acquiring close votes, there is no explicit way for users to vote to keep a question open. After the question is closed, 5 more users can vote to reopen a question, but this rarely happens for a number of reasons: the question can't get bumped to the top with new answers, the users who thought that the question should have remained open have already seen the question and interacted with it before it was closed, and they don't get notified when the question gets closed. And moderators are reluctant to reopen questions closed by other users unless a meta discussion about the question occurs. In addition, reopen votes expire fairly quickly, and there is a waiting period before a reopen vote can be reissued.

Despite the fact that there is no explicit way for users to vote to keep a question open while it is in the process of being closed, there are de facto methods for users to express their desire to keep a question open. When a user upvotes a question or posts an answer to a question, they are in effect expressing their opinion that the question is on-topic and should remain open. I understand that it is often said that "high votes don't equate to on-topic," but at the same time we can't ignore that high votes (or even just a few positive votes) indicate that there were users who thought the question had merit.

As a result of the bias toward closing questions, we have a lot of questions on our site that have been closed, and yet I (and others, I think) believe that many of these were closed in error and should be reopened.

We could discuss each of these questions on meta and try to come to consensus on which ones should be reopened, which ones can be reopened with edits, and which ones were closed legitimately. However, this activity will take a long time to complete, and it is debatable if this is a valuable use of all of our time and effort.

A viable alternative is to simply refrain from manually deleting closed questions en masse. By not deleting these questions, we honor the desire of the users and moderators who originally closed the question, and we also don't destroy the hard work of the users who spent their time and effort answering these questions that they believe are actually on-topic. This also allows the debate on what constitutes an open-worthy question to continue without putting an artificial timetable or deadline on it.

Stack Exchange has an auto delete feature (dubbed the Roomba) that automatically deletes questions under certain criteria. Closed questions with no positive score answers will eventually be deleted without any user action necessary. There really is no reason why users must go around deleting closed questions with any urgency.

To be fair, I think there are rare times when manual deletion of questions is warranted. We want to delete questions whose presence is actively harmful to our site or to our readers. Spam should be swiftly deleted, as should posts with abusive language. Sometimes we get questions where the OP decides to post their bank account number; those need to be deleted quickly as well. But off-topic questions with negative scores do not need to be manually deleted; the Roomba will clean that up. And for questions that are closed as off-topic yet have good answers from respected users, we need to recognize that there is not consensus whether this question is really on-topic or not. And waiting some arbitrary amount of time before deletion doesn't really address the issue. One thing moderators might not realize is that manual deletion by a moderator is final; it is not possible for ordinary users to vote to undelete, and it cannot be undone by any process except another moderator action.

I have seen people make the argument that you shouldn't look at answers in deciding whether or not a question should be closed; that you can't turn an off-topic question into an on-topic question by writing an on-topic answer. However, what that argument fails to take into account is that a good answer can show you how a question you originally thought was off-topic really is on-topic. This happens all the time; users read a question and immediately think "Too broad; This can't be answered concisely," or "Primarily opinion-based; This can't be answered objectively." They might issue their close vote, but if someone comes along and answers concisely or objectively, that answerer has proven the close-voter wrong. If an answer is written that is an on-topic answer, perhaps it means that the question simply needs a minor edit to be kept on-topic.

In conclusion, I don't see any need for our moderators to blindly follow some convention from other Stack Exchange sites in deleting closed questions without considering the opinions of the users who have voted up and answered these questions, indicating that they believe the questions should not have been closed.

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Edit: I would just like to point out that my answer here is the compromise option. Some users want to delete lots of questions, not content with them being closed. Others (myself included) think that many of those should be reopened. The compromise solution is to simply leave them closed and not deleted, but able to be re-opened or re-closed if the consensus changes in the future on any individual questions, preserving without officially endorsing the work of answerers.