Timeline for The number of votes required to close and reopen questions is temporarily reduced . . . for science!
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
20 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nov 16, 2015 at 21:04 | comment | added | gnat | I see, that makes sense. Though them trying to stay firm within site scope makes SF an interesting site to compare to Programmers | |
| Nov 16, 2015 at 20:58 | comment | added | user40980 | I'm also going to mention that as of this writing, there are only 11 posts that have close votes on them (3x have 2 votes). There are also three with reopen votes, and 14 reopened since Nov 9th. | |
| Nov 16, 2015 at 20:55 | comment | added | user40980 | @gnat I want to say I suspect that there recent crisis of community moderation and scope influenced them just as the early scope change here did (which relied very much on the mods to change the direction). It also burnt out a mod on each site. However, they don't have people looking back at recent history of the site as the "good old days" complicating matters. Thus, if one is to look at sites, its necessary to pull one that has a large enough close queue to see a distribution of votes - and SF's mods are actively directing the site and keeping the queue low enough for the community. | |
| Nov 16, 2015 at 20:52 | comment | added | gnat | I've been studying SF meta lately and it feels like diamonds play a big role in shaping its close queue. As far as I can tell, they are really quick to close and delete questions that are clear cut off-topics. Fuzzier stuff, they seem to handle it like Programmers diamonds do, they leave it to community to take care of | |
| Nov 16, 2015 at 20:39 | comment | added | user40980 | @gnat Either S[FU] would work. SO has an extreme problem of scale that makes it unlike anything else. SF, however, only has 87 pending close review tasks. Not sure if that's from diamonds killing the queue, or if they've actually gotten the community moderation. Thus, SU is probably one that is better with a 300 sized queue that you can actually see some distribution to. | |
| Nov 16, 2015 at 20:06 | comment | added | gnat | wonder why they don't compare Programmers to Server Fault. As far as I can tell, folks over there eventually settled on site scope and defend it quite firmly | |
| Nov 12, 2015 at 17:10 | comment | added | enderland | @KaseySpeakman I would encourage you to drop by the site chat if you have questions you feel are unfairly closed and need reopen votes. While you might get disagreement, any unfairly closed question which is actually on topic will almost assuredly get reopen votes from the community there. It does happen when people edit their questions to provide more information and they get reopened. But frankly most questions closed never get more information from the poster - as a community we need that info to make a useful/answerable question. | |
| Nov 11, 2015 at 21:13 | comment | added | user40980 | @KaseySpeakman its easier to do when the question is closed and hasn't been answered... and there is a core of a good question there. See also What is needed to really fix a question (an Atwood transform). However, when the question is one of the fundamental off topic reasons (polling ones) it is very difficult to do. ... and then sometimes you get the OP who returns to the question and makes hostile revisions too. Though yes, we do encourage it, and its hard. | |
| Nov 11, 2015 at 21:03 | comment | added | Kasey Speakman | @Yannis, I appreciate the comment. It is good to know how the mechanics work. I would be curious to see numbers on how many questions are actually edited back into shape (especially by not-the-author). It seems a daunting task to do properly. | |
| Nov 11, 2015 at 20:11 | comment | added | yannis Mod | @KaseySpeakman Meta isn't your only option when it comes to re-opening questions. Sometimes all it takes is editing the question to shape (see: meta.stackexchange.com/a/196078/162704). You also have the option of dropping the question into our chat room, and discussing the closure with the regulars there. And you can always use a custom flag to ask a diamond to review a closure (we'll probably redirect you to Meta for the non clear-cut cases though). | |
| Nov 11, 2015 at 17:14 | comment | added | Kasey Speakman | @MichaelT. I suppose it is a philosophical question "Where does this site fall on a scale between developing a Q/A showcase or helping users?" I'm not going to argue the point in these comments. I only referenced some questions so that my statements were not as nebulous. | |
| Nov 11, 2015 at 16:59 | comment | added | user40980 | @KaseySpeakman an important consideration that many make is the ability to help the next person with the question. Part of the mouseover for a down vote is "it is not useful". In trying to make the site one with a high signal to noise ratio - that the questions and answers are ones that are helpful to a wider audience, many people will down vote or close questions that are not likely to be useful to the wider community. We also endeavor to close questions that will draw too many answers, or answers that are incomplete by themselves. | |
| Nov 11, 2015 at 15:30 | comment | added | Kasey Speakman | @MichaelIT, I have been trying to get a feel for how things work before arguing meta. My approach up to now has been: If I feel a down-voted/hold question is reasonable and answerable (and not a homework problem), I just go ahead and answer it anyway. It could still at least help the user even if it gets buried in the list. 1 2 | |
| Nov 11, 2015 at 15:10 | comment | added | user40980 | @KaseySpeakman if you have a question about a specific closed or down voted question, asking about it here, on meta, can help either explain or reopen the question. It can be difficult to deal with otherwise nebulous too many things get closed or down voted. Specific questions can help us recognize the direction that closing needs to take. | |
| Nov 11, 2015 at 14:50 | comment | added | Kasey Speakman | I agree with @JonEricson. I have seen many questions that get closed or down-voted even though they are reasonably answerable and interesting. The mods here seem to be in unison (a good thing), but I believe a lot of questions are closed or down-voted to join the bandwagon. If my belief is true, then it's unfair to the askers because some questions can get downvoted/closed simply because one mod doesn't like it, or thinks it's too broad because they aren't familiar with the topic... then the others follow suit and a reasonable question gets buried. | |
| Nov 11, 2015 at 2:53 | comment | added | user40980 | @JonEricson while it isn't the help center, we do have Why was my question closed or down voted? which tries to go a bit more into the nuances of why we close some things with certain reasons. Its one of the "if we could write a book and put it in the help/on-topic, we'd get even fewer people to read it." I would be curious to have this discussion (maybe in chat some time?) about particular questions and the reasons that it got closed. | |
| Nov 11, 2015 at 0:34 | comment | added | Jon Ericson StaffMod | I see a lot of well-written, well-intentioned, and even well-formulated questions closed for non-obvious reasons. I flip over to the on topic help and I can kinda see the reason if I squint. Obviously there's junk too. (It's easy enough to identify those from the title alone.) On the plus side, I do see a lot of folks working with OPs to get their questions reopened. | |
| Nov 10, 2015 at 21:23 | comment | added | user40980 | @JonEricson out of pure curiosity, any preliminary thoughts from your sampling yesterday? | |
| Nov 9, 2015 at 21:00 | comment | added | Jon Ericson StaffMod | I am sampling closed questions today. Mostly I'm looking for ways that the setting change might have broken things. But I am looking at the content of the questions as well. Scope definition is certainly part of the equation; perhaps the primary term. Note that it doesn't take much to improve the recovery rate. We are talking about one extra question in hundred, which just might become the sand for an amazing answer. The system is built on chance and not certainty, so I'm going to evaluate primarily on the statistics. | |
| Nov 9, 2015 at 20:16 | history | answered | user40980 | CC BY-SA 3.0 |