@YannisRizos - When people are upset that questions were closed and they fear they might be deleted you say it's just to prevent new answers. When people are upset that closed questions were deleted you say that's what happens to closed questions that aren't improved.
@psr All closed questions are on a path to deletion. On ProgSE, we tend to avoid deleting closed questions that add value to the site, regardless of whether they fit our guidelines or not. If you have evidence to the contrary, Meta is where you should post it.
@psr Where's the contradiction? Closures themselves are nothing more than a way to stop further answers, what happens to a question after it gets closed is a different issue. Some will certainly be deleted, some will be re-opened and most duplicates will be merged. "not worth having around" is only relevant to the first category.
...and it's not like we don't have quite a few years old closed questions around...
...but if it's guarantees you are looking for, then the only guarantee that a closed question won't be deleted is getting it re-opened.
@psr When you get to 10K you'll get access to a list of recently deleted questions. At that point you'll realize that we only delete crap. The only time that questions that weren't necessarily crap were deleted was during STCI, but those deletion candidates were advertised on Meta for at least two weeks prior to deletion (and if I remember correctly, only @Rachel stepped up and salvaged a few).
@YannisRizos @psr As a 10k+ user I can confirm that they are indeed a pile of stinking garbage. They smell like a combination of solder, magic smoke, and wet, feral turing machines.
@YannisRizos - During STCI I didn't salvage any because Mark Trapp's criteria for what would constitute salvaging were incomprehensible. What was wrong with them in the first place was frequently incomprehensible.
@JimG. I'm basically the same as my online presence. Honest, chatty, knowledgeable, serious, and kind of a jackass now and then though I don't mean to be
@WorldEngineer: That's actually a good point. // Although I've said that at least half a dozen times that if @Rachel and @YannisRizos went out for a beer (in the real world), they'd walk away with a newfound appreciation for each other.
@WorldEngineer: I understand why moderators are expected to uphold consistency; but I also know that Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." // Even if Stackexchange wanted most sites to be strictly Q&A, J think that it could carve out a niche for more permissive sites, which is why I'm often sympathetic to @Rachel's point of view.
@JimG I'm going to jump in on your previous discussion if you don't mind... you have to remember that SE is a network for expert Q&A. That doesn't mean that beginners aren't welcome but it means that the network is trying to be one of the most reliable source for info on everything. Subjective questions don't have any home here because there is no real answer. That's why you don't see "What language should I learn next?" In an Encyclopedia.
It's not that I'm against the questions, but that's why forums haven't completely died out...
@Dynamic: I really can't disagree with anything you just said.
@Dynamic: During 2010-2011, I feel like many borderline questions were abruptly and unilaterally closed, and I feel like that sucked some of the life out of Programmers.SE. For instance, some very excellent users from that time period no longer contribute here.
Fortunately, the current roster of moderators try to rehabilitate borderline questions. They understand that abrupt closures discourage new users.
But I'm often sympathetic to @Rachel 's point of view because I definitely shared her concern about the abrupt closures (approximately 1.5 years ago).
@JimG Abrupt closures are sometimes needed to make a statement: "This question is NOT going to be dealt with on the site". I feel like we (as a community) do a good job of sending the message when needed and letting the questions play out if we aren't positive.
@Dynamic: I don't have a problem with abrupt closures. But I do have a problem with abrupt unilateral closures on borderline questions by moderators who aren't interested in an alternate point of vide
@Dynamic I think Programmers is something of the odd man out along with physics and math and a few others where the gulf between beginners and pro is huge
"The cast and crew of "Mamma Mia" did a better job promoting tourism in Greece than any Ministry of Tourism effort. Spain, Italy, and Turkey are eating our lunch."
Number of folks who need to be hit by a bus before the system is effected
granted lacking gnat it wouldn't have a significant effect, but lacking gnat, walter and chrisF the effect would be VERY significant on the way the front page of P.SE looked in regards to close votes
Or maybe it wouldn't. Maybe others would pick up the slack because enough others agree with them
But we will never know if they are a minority in opinion on what should be closed or not without abstinence from them for a test which won't happen I don't suspect. Not a huge deal frankly, the site isn't bad necessarily right now, I can still enjoy it. I just think it might benefit a greater deal of people more than the 3 lost if they abstained from executing their opinion upon the site.
@JimmyHoffa: Oh wow. That's a great point. And this is exactly how I felt during the @Mark Trapp era. I should engineer my own query to confirm this suspicion.
@JimG. Honestly it was like an hour or something after I had a protracted argument with Mark Trapp on Meta that he left. I know people seem to miss him but I feel proud and that I may have been the straw that broke the camel's back effectively benefitting the site as a whole
@JiimmyHoffa: I'm actually glad he's gone. He wasn't very friendly, and although he had an unbelievable amount of activity on the StackExchange network, I'm not convinced that he was a net positive.
It became clear that the argument did nothing in convincing him so I deleted all of my comments on the post and suggested he do the same, think he may have also decided to delete his account as well.
@JimmyHoffa Two mistakes: 1) Closure stats are pointless if you don't count deleted questions (and you can't), 2) You're assuming that people who don't vote to close disagree with the closures. For everyone else but yourself that's pure speculation.
If you want to influence the site more, all you have to do is... do more. If you disagree with a closure, try and get the question re-opened. Everything else is just a waste of time.
Also, I wouldn't be surprised if our more active close voters are also our more active re-open voters... Some people are just a bit more active than others, and I have no idea why you've chosen to focus on the one activity that you perceive as negative, and are ignoring everything else.
make no mistake as to my allusions regarding that. but I'm an engineer, speculating about the interplay of parts in a complex system based on statistics I can find is what I do :P
@YannisRizos: Right - A devil's advocate would say, "If @gnat and @Walter hadn't voter to close question 'A', then somebody else would have." - And I actually buy that argument. // The unilateral closures are a different story; but like I said, I don't think that's a problem for Programmers.SE right now (although it may have been at one time).
So, why are we even talking about this? I could understand a discussion about mod closures, but every regular user can only influence the site to a very certain degree.
@JimG. Also don't forget that the query shows successful close votes, being at the top of that list is a very good thing, it means that your instincts are mostly right (as normally it takes 4 others to agree with you before your close vote is successful).
@YannisRizos I invoke godwins law at you, you are a godwin! I mean a fascist! Oh wait, that's a load of bullocks. Uhm.. Just quit shooting down my ideas alright? Ya jerk. :)
There's a curiosity, who has the highest question/answer/comment count in the same period, is it the same people with the highest close vote count?
@YannisRizos But as an example, run the query on some of the other smaller SE sites. You'll see different trends in the range of numbers in the top 10 close voters (Just need to type a SE URL in the box below the "run query" button)
I like to use Data.SE to view usage stats for some of the sites, however deleted posts are not included on Data.SE and I think this skews the numbers quite a bit, particularly on sites with a lot of deletions.
Would it be possible to include some limited data about deleted posts in Data.SE?
You...
Interesting, highest number of posts (Qs/As) since 1/1/2012 correlates to commonly low close-votes (except ElYusubov who is just an all around extremely active fella)
I just don't understand how deleted questions plays into it other than to increase the sample size which appears of relatively sufficient size already?
It's just a count from the Posts table where the user created the post. My read of the PostTypes table tells me they're posts of Qs/As and other things but not votes
@JimmyHoffa Almost all deleted questions are closed, and there are seriously hundreds of questions that have been deleted in the past 3 months that are not included in Data.SE data
@JimmyHoffa Of course. For example, I've deleted 900+ questions this quarter, and I've closed more than half, that's about 450 successful close votes that are missing from your query (and only for the past 4 months).
@JimmyHoffa Probably, because the deleted questions are usually the bottom of the low-quality questions, so you get a lot of good closers in those close vote lists
@Rachel what do deleted posts tell us in the scope of who makes most close votes? If most folks doing close votes now were doing more with the delete votes it just shows the same thing, an extremely active minority, if it shows other users coming up to par with the same folks then you could say the minority who are actively close voting more than everyone else are doing so disproportionately on questions not bad enough to be deleted
@JimmyHoffa We won't know unless we look at the data. The main reason I asked originally was for stats about open vs closed questions. It may be that data isn't as relevant in your queries
Most people come to a Q&A site to ask and answer questions, everything else is a secondary activity, and the majority of the community doesn't get involved in any secondary activity.
@YannisRizos Hrrm considered there are almost 9k questions in Data.SE since 10/1/2012, that means roughly 10+% of questions are deleted and missing from Data.SE
Bah I like stats and numbers too much. I'm going to bed :)
I find it interesting that the top 3 folks closing questions participate in asking and answering them very little (way down the list in number of Qs/As). Would make it seem like they may be taking more away from the site than they're contributing. I actually expected to see them pretty high up there. That said, my query may be wrong.
@JimmyHoffa Closing by itself doesn't do anything more than stop further answers. Deletion is a different process, and one that needs a new set of votes.
You may be archiving old questions by closing them to keep people off of them, but when someone wants to ask a question on a related topic, they start writing the title, see the closed question and presume well dang they don't want this content
However that said, a great majority of closed questions are low quality for the site, and probably don't belong. But in that case I think we need to improve the way we market our site and introduce ourselves to new users
@Rachel New questions asked is terribly skewed because of deletions, and the answer count going down is actually a good thing. Actually, it's absolutely fantastic, there's nothing worse for the site than those crap questions with 20+ (almost) one line answers that said more or less the same.
I can understand the final dip at the end due to the holiday, however based on our new user rate, questions, answers, and votes should be going up, not down
even with negative content growth traffic would likely still grow. The internet adds new users constantly, and the net programmer count in the world is likely growing
@YannisRizos .... See this sort of attitude is why I had to stop participating with programmers. I can't argue with people who ignore stats, evidence, and users that try time and again to make the same argument against the system and just get sent away by the crowd of established meta users
@Rachel Hm, what? What am I ignoring? 99% of our questions are answered, and we've maintained that percentage for as long as I remember. The fact that we dropped from 8 answers per question to about 5 is a very good thing.
This isn't a forum, 7-8 answers per question was not healthy...
I agree with @Rachel. Yes, "the audience that remains has a higher percentage of experts in the field" - however, this trend may end up with a closed circle of experts who have nothing to ask, thus nothing to answer... :-( — Péter TörökFeb 20 '12 at 10:44
@YannisRizos Oh, I often don't bother using the "reply" arrow, I just type @Ya[tab] so it "replies" to the most recent message of yours
@Rachel Nope, it doesn't. If you see the little arrow, you've responded to a specific message, if you just type the username, it doesn't link to a previous message.
In any case, I was talking about answers. And I don't really care about the rest of the "evidence", they are fuzzy at best.
Well I'm off. I wish someone with access to the full database and a knowledge of stats and what makes a healthy Q&A site for the internet would run some queries and adjust some things accordingly, but oh well
I know this is coming at the discussion fairly late but @YannisRizos is right, you're focusing on one thing that you think is "bad". My bet is if you checked the data you would find that most of those mean close voters :) are also on the top of the list for editors as well...
I would also speculate that those top close voters are also the top commenters
Just saying you could be looking at a ton of different activity other than just focusing on close votes.
But I don't suspect that to be much of the case, @YannisRizos being way up there and haven't very few Qs/As heh
Ordered by number of Comments+Edits http://data.stackexchange.com/programmers/query/90849/top-close-voters
I shouldn't have names in there. I'm not trying to single people out, I'm just trying to see how activity lays out in the site to a small portion of users or a large portion
That's the minority opinion I'm trying to show statistics prove. The majority opinion is clearly otherwise considering how few people do close vote, and based on posts/comments/edits you can't call those users who aren't close-voting disengaged
I've been playing with R recently, so if you want me to try to make pretty graphs or do computations and get something that is useful in a CSV format, let me know and I can make pictures or do stats on it.
I think most people other than the minority recognize close-votes have two negative effects: They remove content which is potentially beneficial to 1 person (the poster) and possible many others (yes close doesn't delete but as Yannis said it will be) but more importantly than that: Close votes discourage participation by making clear that participation will be punished unless you're super careful.
Go ahead heh, could be fun for you for sure, see if R can give you greater insights into the data.
Not all closures will lead to deletions. Duplicates, for example. Duplicates are good closures, since it adds terms for searching and then a link to the good answers.
Generally questions that are deleted are those questions that are not useful for the site where they are asked, such as off-topic, not constructive, not real, and too localized questions.
Duplicated questions are generally not deleted because they can help who is searching the duplicated questio...
To quote: "Over time, closed questions that are not useful as signpoints to other questions may also be removed". Duplicates pointing to open questions are useful as signs and shouldn't be deleted. /cc @YannisRizos
Because of the count, if they've never voted for a closure, it'll still say 1 because that 1 record it's counting is the User record, while the Left join on post history isn't multiplying their user record to count more than 1
@gnat So I was apparently wrong all over the place and the vote invalidation does trigger on deleted posts. Don't take it personally - the script is dumb and can't tell your intent or judge the quality of the posts. At least in this case the posts were improved? :)
@Walter I participate a fairly bit I believe. And I admit the query may not be 100% correct, it's a bit of a complex query off hand and most of it was written late at night heh. I don't show up in the queries because my close-vote ability came less than a week ago and these statistics are over the course of a year.
A cow-orker of mine asked the question "What is a good program to write to show off the differences between languages and let languages really have some meat to the problem?"
Kind of like how everyone writes "hello world" to show basic printing, but it doesn't really show anything about the language.
I believe the poker hand evaluator has enough leeway in its design that each language can implement it in a way that showcases that language... other ideas for other problems that would work similarly?
Iduno, cleverness though bad in general makes a little sense in show casing
cleverness takes a languages features to the absolute extreme
Which does a good job of contrasting it to show what it can do, but it's bad show casing if you're trying to show that feature of the language in a good light heh
No part of cleverness makes the feature look good so much as it draws you to the bounds of that feature, which can be useful in understanding that feature
I recall reading a bit on some AI challenge and the guy was going to do it in Ruby... and fought with it alot... then switched back to java and had it running quickly the way he wanted to without fighting.
I'm more thinking about language/program structure. "Look at the neat things we can do with enums... did you know java had an EnumSet that works as fast as a bitfield?"
Or the scalar/integer/string nature in perl... "I'll just concatenate these strings of digits together and then sort them as a integer" - that type of thing.
Which is why I like the poker example better. I was wondering if there are other good, standardish problems that can be used to demonstrate the language.
the leaderboard stuff I like because it requires calculating the games score to come up with the winner which shows calculation, there's plenty of data modelling, and the board itself would be IPC updated/accessed
and it's very simple to understand and do
could involve transactionality wherein you show WCF's distributed transaction abilities
I added up comments and edits. Go ahead and add on Posts as well and that's all, unless you also want close votes added in. If you want total activity that's a much easier query.
@JimmyHoffa I never said that. I said all closed questions are on a path to deletion, but they can also be: re-opened, merged (dupes), or even stay around closed for quite some time. Not all closures will lead to deletion, but the only guarantee that a closed question won't be deleted is getting it re-opened (except dupes).
