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A question about how programmer's certs relate to a college degree was asked.

I answered, I got upvoted.

I think it got deleted. It's not showing up in my history at least. That being a mystery kinda sucks.

Anyway, it was a decent question about the value of programming certificates. When asked for more detail, the guy made his question specific to a certain Java cert while leaving the question's title broad. The question was closed as "too local", which is understandable if silly.

Closed is one thing, deleted another. I was negative when it came to certs, and others agreed. I don't think I was overly critical, argumentative, or rude and I tried to offer constructive alternatives.

So what gives? Is there some sort of bias for certs around here?

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There were two questions in the question in question, a general one and a very specific and localized one. Unfortunately the emphasis was on the localized one, which lead to the question getting closed. I deleted it during a routine manual clean up, too localized questions are rarely salvaged, and this one didn't have a single edit, no effort to get it re-opened. Closed is a temporary state that leads to deletion, unless someone steps up and improves the question and gets it re-opened.

Your answer, or any of the other ones, had nothing to do with the question getting deleted, it's the question that is closed and subsequently deleted, answers rarely play a part in it. I've made a small edit to bring the focus of the question to the general one and undeleted it. Hopefully others will continue improving it and it will be re-opened, but if it stays closed it may get deleted again in the future.

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    Ok. That's good to know. Is there a way to see what's been deleted? Otherwise there's a giant mysterious void. Also, the original question really just restated the title with a specific cert. GlenH7's revision kinda made for two different questions. – Philip Aug 6 '12 at 19:35
  • @Philip Well, when there's a giant mysterious void, you know something was deleted ;) Other than that, no there isn't a way to see what's been deleted. When you reach 10K, you'll have access to a list of recently deleted questions, but that's about it. – yannis Aug 6 '12 at 19:37
  • Is it really considered too localized simply because it's talking about certs because they're "time dependent"? Or this specific OCPJP cert? – Philip Aug 6 '12 at 19:38
  • @Philip The specific part of the question is too localized because it benefits a very small number of people, just one, the asker. Fortunately all answerers skipped the specific part, the general part I'd say it's ok. I'm not re-opening since it was a community closure, and I think it should be re-opened by the community (or at least a couple of re-open votes before a mod steps in). The topic has little to do with the closure, certificates are time dependent but we do have a lot of open certification questions. – yannis Aug 6 '12 at 19:41
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Is there some sort of bias for certs around here?

Kind of.

The relevance of certs must be applied to a certain point in time, for which the question can be closed as 'Too Localized'.

To my knowledge, @bethlakshmi has supplied the best definition of 'Too Localized' for time reasons.

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    The "too localized" aspect of the question doesn't have that much to do with certificates, but that the question is only useful to one person, the asker. – yannis Aug 6 '12 at 19:20
  • Is this a simple grammatical thing? Will changing it from "will this help me" to "Will this help a programmer" broaden it's scope? – Philip Aug 6 '12 at 20:02
  • Hmm... @YannisRizos would probably be the best person to ask; although I don't believe that will be enough to save the question. – Jim G. Aug 6 '12 at 20:03
  • @Philip You know what, let's re-open and see how it goes. I'm still on the fence on this one, but there has been enough effort from you and others to salvage it, if we are going to err, let's err on the side of a bad re-opening. If the community doesn't like the question, they can vote to close again. – yannis Aug 6 '12 at 20:06

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