Comments on Quality control of the site
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Quality control of the site
Let's take a look at the state of affairs for the past few weeks on this forum.
For the past two weeks, some users has been posting a lot of questions, a lot of them self-answered. This is not a problem per se, as sharing knowledge is very important.
But let's look at these questions. They are very short and very specific and poorly edited. Clearly the community at large does not like them, with 2-4 downvotes for each.
However, it looks like there is no quality control regarding these posts. I am the last person to advocate for question deletion, as what is immediately obvious to one can be confusing for another, but clearly there is minimal effort put into these posts.
To quote the guidelines:
We expect questions here to be well thought out, well written, with relevant background info, and to the point. Remember, this isn't a kaffeeklatsch, and we don't want chit-chat. We do want good questions that allow good answers to be written.
Why has there been no moderation on the site in the past two weeks, even if the questions I am referring to clearly do not fit the site's own guidelines?
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There are four things we can do with bad or poorly written questions. In order of seriousness, these are:
- Leave a comment.
- Downvote.
- Close.
- Delete.
The questions you mention have mostly been addressed with #1 and #2. Do you really think more severe measures are appropriate for the questions you mention? I'm really asking. I'd like to know what the more active users think.
My own impression was that while they weren't well written, closing them would have had a negative effect since they were self-answered. Closing would leave the poorly written answer, but prevent others from adding better answers. That worked in a few cases, like here. In other cases, nobody else jumped in with a better answer.
Ultimately, this is a problem of quality. Voting is the primary way to address that. In that sense, the system seems to have worked, for example here. The question wasn't off topic, and I think we all understood what was being asked, so closing didn't make sense. The problem was really the laziness, and the votes reflected that.
A recurring theme is sloppiness showing no respect for the users here, sometimes to the point of being rude. Of course everyone's idea of where these lines are is different. I thought some progress was being made in that regard, but just now saw this disaster of a schematic. I thought that was too sloppy to let live, and closed it. I'd like to hear from other users that have invested some effort into this site what they think should have been done.
This site is young and hasn't yet reached critical mass. We have to walk a fine line between not killing content to allow reaching critical mass, but not scaring off potential contributors with too much poor content. However, that's a whole meta discussion on its own. We need more people asking questions. Get the word out to everyone you know.
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