Delete some questions instead of just closing them

Question

There are the FAQ's, plenty of closed questions (heads on top of spears), and comments about what types of questions are appropriate, but since so many questions of the same type are closed, should they just get deleted? I'm assuming this would reduce clutter.

Closing questions may not be providing the intended disincentive. Seeing so many closed questions appears to put some users off: How long will this forum survive if the moderators keep closing questions

Hate to sweep them under the rug and would like to hear what is being done it.

Edit: I don't think the closing question process should be replaced with deletion. Most are in a grey area, but some are just obviously wrong. They're voted to close and get downvoted immediately.

Answer 1

Yes, yes, yes. These questions should be deleted - they are broken windows on the site. If they cannot be edited to meet the standards in the FAQ, they don't belong! As you say, they clutter up the site and hide the good information from everyone.

As for users that have a problem with closing questions: closing is a fundamental operation on Stack Exchange. It allows a community to reject questions that are off topic or are bad quality. If you let them remain, the scope of the community gradually implicitly increases until you have Yahoo! Answers. The quality of both the questions and the answers also goes down, to the same hole. I'm not talking about basic vs. advanced questions here; the quality of communication (how well the OP describes his problem and whether the answers fix it in a way he can understand) is at stake.

Therefore, these questions should be removed so that the best questions can get more attention.

From the SE post on deletion:

Why would you delete a question? Isn’t closing it enough?

• Some questions are of such poor quality that they cannot be salvaged. They’re literally nonsense. Not every byte of data that is created in the world is infinite and sacred.
• Some questions are so incredibly off topic that they add no value to a programming community.*
• The mental cost of processing these closed questions is not zero, particularly for users who are actively engaged and scanning questions to find things they can help answer. *If users see a lot of closed questions, they’ll note that we don’t enforce the guidelines, so why should they? Without any final resolution, asking questions that get closed becomes something we are implicitly encouraging — a broken windows problem. If this goes on for long enough, we’re no longer a community of programmers who ask and answer programming questions, we’re a community of random people discussing.. whatever. That’s toxic.
• If enough of these closed questions are allowed to hang around, they become clutter that reduces the overall signal to noise ratio — which further reduces confidence in the system.

^{*I believe this can be generalized to "that specific community" throughout the post, now that SE has sites for more than just programming.}

Answer 2

Some closed questions get deleted by the system over time. At 30 days, unlocked and unanswered questions with a negative score get deleted. At 365 days, questions with a score of 0 or less (or 1 with a deleted owner), no answers, not locked, has limited comments, and a small view count will get automatically deleted. The checks are not run daily, but weekly, so there might be a few days between it hitting the point for automatic deletion and it actually getting deleted automatically.

Here on Programmers, we also have the Structured Tag Clean-Up Initiative, which deals with poor tags on the site. Part of this process is also identifying questions within the tag that can not be salvaged and deleting them manually. However, this only addresses one tag at a time. Also, there are closed questions in good tags that are both inappropriate for this site and unsalvagable - these won't get caught by STCI.

Closed is meant as a temporary state. Most questions should not go from closed to deleted quickly. The purpose of closed is to give the community a chance to turn the question into something good, while preventing answers. It's much easier to save a question with no or few answers than one with a lot of answers - edits to a question that invalidate answers don't make sense. The reason is that invalidating answers would lead to answers getting downvoted because the answerer was unaware the question changed and didn't delete or change their answer - these would be unwarranted downvotes.

As an aside, perhaps someone could build a Data Explorer query to show all closed questions, ordered by date (oldest first) and then votes (most negative first). Perhaps an additional piece would be to restrain it to those questions that are at least 3 or 4 months old. Questions that show up in this query could be targets for immediate editing or deletion. I'm not sure if we want to stack this clean up initiative on top of STCI, but it might give us some data to work with.

Answer 3

There are some extremely poor questions that unfortunately won't be automatically deleted. I've used this SEDE query to identify them and I deleted quite a few questions that:

1. Were closed at least two months ago, and
2. There were no edits since they were closed, and
3. Didn't have a single re-open vote, and
4. They weren't duplicates or migrations (migrations are a bit tricky), and
5. They had no highly upvoted answers.

However this is way outside a moderator's responsibilities, deletions should happen by the community (10K+ users) and we should intervene only in exceptional circumstances. I would really appreciate it if you started using your delete votes.

Answer 4

There are many reasons for closing a question instead of deleting it.

• Closed questions can be edited to be brought back on-topic, and re-opened. This would never happen with a deleted question.

• It is not always agreed upon that the question should be closed. By allowing more users to see the question, it can be evaluated by the community and determined if the question should actually be closed or open.

• Closed questions can be viewed by any user, while deleted questions can only be viewed by users with over 10K reputation. This would restrict a large number of our users from editing or voting to reopen closed questions.

  In addition, many people come here seeking answers which can be found in our closed questions. Having a closed question with answers they can read discourages them from posting new questions, and sets an example.

In summary, I would strongly disagree with any decision such as this. You would be cutting the community out of a large part of the moderation process, and the SE sites are meant to be community-run Q&A sites.

Answer 5

Alternatively less questions could be closed.