5

As part of a cleanup of the tag mentioned earlier on meta, we need to clean up the closed questions found therein.

There's no point in shuffling around tags on questions that are off-topic or bad to begin with: if we can save these highly-upvoted questions, now's the time to do it.

1. Merge candidates

There are two questions that were closed as being exactly duplicates of earlier questions:

Is there any reason why these questions should not be merged, effectively deleting the tagged versions?

If not, can these questions be improved so that they can be reopened? Otherwise, flag or vote for deletion so we can clean them up.

2. The rest

Can these questions be saved by a heroic edit and community pruning?

If any of these questions can be saved, please be bold and do so: flag bad answers for deletion, combine piecemeal answers into a single canonical one, rewrite the question, flag for reopening.

Otherwise, the end game for these questions is deletion; so if there's something about these questions that necessitate them being here, let's whip them into shape.

6
  • What are the guidelines for merging small answers into a single all-encompassing answer? Should I just edit an existing answer and go from there?
    – user7007
    Commented Jan 6, 2012 at 13:17
  • @GlennNelson Yep, edit an existing answer and flag the now-obsolete answer for deletion. A canonical answer will eventually convert to community wiki, but you can also flag the answer you're making canonical so we can speed that process along.
    – user8
    Commented Jan 6, 2012 at 13:27
  • @YannisRizos Voting to close and flagging is fine, but if there's a reasonable number of them, consider posting the list here on meta to get other eyes on them.
    – user8
    Commented Jan 6, 2012 at 23:28
  • @MarkTrapp I'm almost done cleaning up the tag, all that remains is the list in my answer. Give it a look when you'll have some time...
    – yannis
    Commented Jan 20, 2012 at 17:38
  • @ZaphodBeeblebrox Check out my answer for how we'll handle them. If people aren't bothering to save them, they're on their way to deletion.
    – user8
    Commented Jan 20, 2012 at 21:50
  • @MarkTrapp Cool, thanks. I'll check back at some point. Time to resume cleaning up career then...
    – yannis
    Commented Jan 20, 2012 at 21:55

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
3

questions that should probably be closed:

I'll keep updating the list as I go through the tag, all of the above got my close vote for one reason or the other. Everyone please review and:

  1. Try to salvage, or
  2. Flag / Vote to close

Please do not vote to migrate, most of the questions are really old and there is no point in migrating them on StackOverflow, or anywhere else.

Done.

I've gone through each and every one of the questions. The only open ones still tagged are the ones in this list. They all got my close vote, but of course I'm not assuming they will be closed.

Moderators (and everyone, really), please review the list.

4
  • 3
    Just to note: I'm noticing a lot of old questions getting votes to migrate to Stack Overflow: if a question is dead, migrating it now is futile at best. Just vote to close as off-topic.
    – user8
    Commented Jan 12, 2012 at 11:49
  • @MarkTrapp Reverse crap migration! Let the games begin...
    – yannis
    Commented Jan 12, 2012 at 23:16
  • I just finished going through the list. I cleaned up some posts, tags, and voted to close as I felt was appropriate. /cc @MarkTrapp
    – Thomas Owens Mod
    Commented Jan 24, 2012 at 15:15
  • @ThomasOwens Thanks!
    – yannis
    Commented Jan 24, 2012 at 15:18
2

After 2.5 weeks of no objections or attempts to salvage the questions, I went ahead and did the following:

Merged

Deleted

The next step is to work through Yannis's list of close candidates: we will be closing questions that are off-topic, not constructive, or too localized as written. After a month, they will be deleted. So now's the time to save any questions there with heroic edits.

You must log in to answer this question.