@@W5VO Shall we split the "yes" into two categories: "yes, including replacement parts for repair" and "yes, but not replacement parts for repairs" ?

@NickAlexeev I thought about it. My plan was to figure out the specifics of the policy after figuring out the broad community opinion first. To me, it seems that a majority of these questions are mostly about repair and connector identification.

@W5VO Do you expect each voter to cast a unipolar vote (upvote only the option he wants), or a bipolar vote (upvote the option he wants, downvote the other one)?

@NickAlexeev Thanks for reminding me about that, I would probably only count upvotes (and not care about absolute score/downvotes)

@W5VO In the big scheme of things though, it's more important what large caliber contributors think about it than what the userXXXXXXes and the cheap reputation seekers think about it.

@NickAlexeev Why would that matter - those people never really answered them to begin with

@W5VO They can take part [anonymously] in the opinion poll. Their vote is counted whether they ask or answer these questions or not.

@NickAlexeev Of course, but that's the intent of the poll. The "large caliber contributors" won't have any extra weight in the vote though. Is this the room you meant to be discussing this in?

@W5VO I'm not uncomfortable with discussing this here. This is about common sense notions. This isn't about moderators' secret sauce.

This poll has a fatal flaw then. Large caliber contributors should have more weight in this, because they are contributors.

Let's ask every voter to post a quick 1-sentence comment when they vote. From the signatures in the comments, we can tell the caliber. If he didn't post a comment then the vote doesn't count.

@NickAlexeev I disagree. Tailoring a site to a handful of people is foolhardy, as people come and go. I've seen many people with relatively high reputation (at the time) leave the site permanently.

If the site cannot handle a major contributor leaving (for any reason), then the site is too fragile and we must address that issue

I'm not trying to run off people, but in the grand scheme of things, we're talking about less than 1% of questions. If you can't avoid questions that you don't like, then I don't know what to say

@NickAlexeev I don't agree to that.

@W5VO Maybe those serious contributors [I can name a few myself] have left because they didn't get the recognition and increased influence on this site.

And I know several that have left because of other user's hostilities

people leaving is a fact of life for a site like this

We're responsible for making sure that the growth rate exceeds the decay

@W5VO That suggests that I'm onto something.

@W5VO So, we should listen to the right kinds of people, rather than listening to the crowd. If we want to attract and keep new large caliber members, we should be listening to existing high caliber members.

@NickAlexeev I think it's just setting up for more arguments and statistical manipulation to justify equivalencies.

regardless of the merit of weighting users' votes differently

@W5VO I'm always on the side of high caliber contributors, as you probably know by now. They are the engine of this community.

I'm not sure that the fraction of identification questions is that small. Let's see if I can make an estimate.

@NickAlexeev I don't think we should ignore those opinions. At the same time, if they scare off all the other fish, what kind of an ecosystem will we be left with? We will be even more dependent on a smaller and smaller population of users. That is how sites die

@NickAlexeev I counted 20 questions in identification in the last month, with 2900 questions total

@W5VO We are in no danger of dying because we ran out of people with questions.

It might be interesting to reach out to some of the large caliber folks who stopped participating and to ask why they stopped.

Of course, it will be multiply defined for each of them.

@NickAlexeev When the criteria is getting closer and closer to "you must know the answer before you ask", then we are running out of questions. We have fewer questions than we did last year.

@NickAlexeev Have you ever heard the phrase: "If you're not growing, you're dying"?

@W5VO I've seendiscussions which start with "The number of questions about X is in decline. X is dying." I've seen them on meta.SO in regards to languages, frameworks. These discussions list lots of different reasons why the number of questions may be in decline. (Hang on, I'll see if I can find meta threads like that.)

While that would be a slightly different situation, the list of possible reasons can be interesting. It's a diverse [lateral] list.

I understand that different frameworks on SO result in question count shifts, do those affect the total question count?

I can't seem to find that meta.SO thread. I should have bloody bookmarked it.

@NickAlexeev Let me know if you come up with a different number. I ended up counting questions by hand, but there certainly could have been more.

I'm going to have to call it a night soon, time zone differences being what they are

@W5VO Did you take into account that we are only in the 9th month of 2018?

@NickAlexeev I only counted August's questions (I think)

@W5VO Alright. This is an interesting conversation. Let's continue in the subsequent days. Good night.

@NickAlexeev Sounds good. Later

@W5VO Maybe this august is an outlier. Here''s what I found.

This year, we don't have fewer questions than last year.