10

We discussed merging and , but now it's time to put a plan into action. Aaronut's plan is great, but we need some help from the posse:

Step 1: Clean up the tags

There are currently several job-related tags that need people to go through and flag or vote to close questions that are no longer (or were never) on-topic:

Guidelines:

  • When you're done cleaning up a tag, post an answer here that you've finished so others know to prioritize other tags.
  • When in doubt about a question, create a new question here on meta instead of flagging so the community can decide if a question is a keeper.
  • Start with the oldest questions first: our really old questions have a high likelihood of no longer meeting the site's guidelines, and are what are in most need of cleanup. We have plenty of time to deal with the newer stuff.

Step 2: Reorganize the survivors

We need to have a set of workable tags and tag synonyms, and any question that survived the purging needs to be edited to include those tags and improved in any way possible. Aaronut's guidelines are pretty good, so let's go with them:

Guidelines:

  • If you have to deviate from the list above, favor tag suffixes: the system allows us to use wildcards in tag preferences, so is preferable to .
  • Spread out the organization. Every time you edit a long-dead question to retag it, it bumps it back to the front page. Retagging 20+ questions at the same time kills the front-page usability for the rest of the visitors.
  • Start with the oldest questions first. Our really old questions have a high likelihood of no longer meeting the site's guidelines, and are what are in most need of cleanup. We have plenty of time to deal with the newer stuff.
  • Request tag synonyms by creating a question here on meta. This is especially important when a tag is organized out of existence (i.e. all the questions that had a tag have had that tag removed in favor of something else).
  • Don't bump questions you don't intend to see reopened. This is going to be disruptive without bumping a ton of questions that don't belong here anyway. If you can save a question by substantially editing it, by all means do that, but if a question is just bad and already closed, at most just flag it for deletion.

Step 3: Burnination

Once all the good questions have been properly organized, we can go through the normal clean-up process of deleting old, off-topic stuff.

7
  • Note that I've unlinked career-advice and career-development so they can be used during the reorganization process.
    – user8
    Jul 18, 2011 at 20:34
  • 5
    Step 4: ??? Step 5: Profit.
    – Adam Lear StaffMod
    Jul 18, 2011 at 20:43
  • So for step one, flag any off-topic posts with the listed tags?
    – user7007
    Jul 19, 2011 at 1:49
  • @Glenn That's correct.
    – user8
    Jul 19, 2011 at 5:50
  • Love the [posse] tag. My work is piling up this week but I'll definitely do what I can. If I vote to close (as opposed to flagging), are mods/10kers going to help out by checking the close vote page, or am I better off just flagging them myself? (or voting and flagging?)
    – Aaronaught
    Jul 19, 2011 at 13:27
  • 1
    @Aaronaught I check the close vote page daily and review anything that's gotten at least two close votes.
    – user8
    Jul 19, 2011 at 17:46
  • 1
    Maybe to add to the guidelines: If you are bumping a question anyways, look if there are more things to edit in the question (and its answers). Sep 30, 2011 at 20:38

5 Answers 5

3

I've cleaned up : any open questions were retagged and any closed questions were deleted.

I've also added new tag wikis for , , , and .

Finally, I've begun work on the gargantuan task of cleaning up : starting from the newest questions and working backward, I'm cleaning up any non-closed question and adding the appropriate tags.

I'd welcome help in this, but we need to take care not to flood the home page with old questions. As a natural throttle, I'm not simply editing the tags, as nearly every question in could use substantial improvements.

2

Flagged about a dozen of questions under as off topic, all of them are now closed. Started retagging some questions under - oldest questions seemed to be on topic but with a variety of unhelpful tags, like . I've spammed the frontpage with 5 old hiring questions, so it's probably time for a brake.

1
1
  • - 1 question flagged
  • - Several "What should I call my self". Top/Accepted answers didn't seem to offer much.
  • Question too specific to the person asking
0

This is a good plan.

Unfortunately I'm having problems getting a stable connection to Stack Exchange at the moment so I won't be as active in this process as I perhaps should be.

You must log in to answer this question.