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Going through some older, closed questions, I found these ones here:

Studies on how noise affects productivity of programmers

Techniques for getting off the ground in any language

How to choose between git and Mercurial

Introducing "20% time" at a workplace

Why do programming books have such wacky cover art?

How big of a team do you need to benefit from bug tracking software?

Are unit tests really that useful?

How to visualize code?

How to be a zero-bug programmer?

Should I return from a function early or use an if statement?

Today, such questions would become downvoted, closed and deleted quickly, but at the time they were asked, all of them got a lot of upvotes and some interesting answers. So I guess they could be candidates for historical locks? Would it be better to delete those question finally? Or would it be more effective to ask about those questions one-by-one, one meta question for each, so we can discuss each one of it in its own thread?

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I took a pass at them:

Studies on how noise affects productivity of programmers - Locked. The view count is a little low, meaning it hasn't gotten a huge amount of attention over the 7 years its been around, but it's very well written with respect to both the question and answer that it's likely to be helpful via search engines.

Techniques for getting off the ground in any language - Deleted. Extremely low view count. Very opinionated answers.

How to choose between git and Mercurial - Deleted. Very low view count. It also seems like it's very time-based. It was asked over 7 years ago - is a comparison between two software tools still valuable after so many changes to the tools and the surrounding environment?

Introducing "20% time" at a workplace - Locked. Very low view count, but I believe the well written question and answer is likely to be useful to people searching and continue to add value.

Why do programming books have such wacky cover art? - Deleted. Totally off-topic and doesn't add much value.

How big of a team do you need to benefit from bug tracking software? - Locked. I'm really on the fence about this one. It's not a stellar question and none of the answers are amazing, and it has a low view count, but it's a useful question. Today, I think this question would have gotten much better answers rooted in experiences rather than the opinionated answers it attracted over 8 years ago.

Are unit tests really that useful? - Locked. Extremely well written question and answers that continue to add value. The view count is a little low, but it seems to be a very relevant question with answers that could even be referred to in other questions. The core questions asked in the question are primarily opinion based, but the title and many of the answers go well beyond what was explicitly asked.

How to visualize code? - Deleted. It's primarily a tool question with many tool answers. It is likely to not be relevant after 5-8 years of no maintenance.

How to be a zero-bug programmer? - Locked. The view count is too high to consider deletion. It's either frequently returned in search results or it may be linked to on other places. Some of the answers are also useful and well written.

Should I return from a function early or use an if statement? - Locked. I'd really like to delete it, but it's way too high in view count. I highly suspect it's found very frequently from outside sources and deleting it may remove valuable and helpful information from the world.

If anyone disagrees with any of these, please feel free to open a new Meta question. But I highly doubt there's disagreement about all 10, so we shouldn't have 10 new Meta questions about old questions just pop up.

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    Thanks Thomas, I went through all of your explanations and find them very convincing. Indeed, the possibility of looking at the question's view count is something I completely missed.
    – Doc Brown
    May 18, 2019 at 16:28
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    @Doc Brown It's not the best thing, but it's the best thing that we have. If we have referrers for particular questions, that would be better. But that doesn't exist.
    – Thomas Owens Mod
    May 18, 2019 at 16:32

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