Timeline for Aggressive closing of questions?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
19 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nov 12, 2011 at 12:38 | comment | added | Stasys | Noam pointed to a very important aspect of "science doing"! Often these are exactly "silly" questions that wake one's brain. Remember "Socrates method". Actually, I don't understand why we need this "shut up!" procedure at all? Would it not be enough to have a separate place where all questions with, say, 5-10 down-votes would be automatically moved? They would remain open, just not as interesting for most people. Yet another thing I don't like is the speed of discussions and decisions. Much like on usual blogs: after 2-3 days the topic dies ... More perseverance would be good. | |
| Oct 27, 2011 at 20:40 | comment | added | Aaron Sterling | @gioele: No, it's not too many. In fact, I upvoted a homework question on the main page, which I now regret doing. (The one about finding a quantum AND.) The problem is not the rejection rate, but the lack of higher-quality questions. Some people may have been discouraged because of the aggressive closing, but that doesn't mean we should allow homework or near-homework. | |
| Oct 27, 2011 at 17:50 | comment | added | gioele | Currently (2011-10-27 18:40 GMT) there are 3 closed questions on the main page and another question with a negative score. This means 4 unwelcome questions out of 15, more than 1/4. If you consider the first 50 questions instead, there are 7 closed questions and 4 with a negative score = 13 unwelcome questions, similar ratio. Isn't 1/4 of "rejection rate" a bit too much? Will an accepted question here count as a journal publication in a few years? :) (This should be a comment but my reputation score is not high enough to post comments on meta.) | |
| Oct 18, 2011 at 13:38 | answer | added | Kaveh | timeline score: 3 | |
| Oct 12, 2011 at 2:31 | answer | added | Robin Kothari | timeline score: 6 | |
| Oct 11, 2011 at 19:31 | comment | added | Jukka Suomela | @PeterShor: Good point. | |
| Oct 11, 2011 at 19:00 | comment | added | Peter Shor | @Jukka: Actually, for "Why do people teach topic X", for X in TCS, there is nowhere else to ask these questions, so I think we should leave reasonable questions of this form open if we don't get overwhelmed by them. I think questions like this might help actually improve the CS curriculum in the long run. | |
| Oct 11, 2011 at 17:29 | comment | added | Jukka Suomela | @PeterShor: Thanks, I think it is indeed a good example of a borderline case. I voted to close it, and my main concern is that with very little thought, any CS student can generate a large number of questions of the form "Why do people teach topic X". But perhaps we could have a semi-official policy that borderline (non-homework) questions that happened to generate good answers can be left open (effectively, highly upvoted answers could be seen as votes against closing). | |
| Oct 11, 2011 at 16:08 | history | tweeted | twitter.com/#!/StackCSTheory/status/123792012892848128 | ||
| Oct 11, 2011 at 16:05 | comment | added | Peter Shor | For examples, the question "How practical is “Automata Theory”, and why is it taught in undergraduate CS curriculum?" was almost closed, and I think it's appropriate for this site and has had some very good answers. | |
| Oct 10, 2011 at 19:36 | comment | added | Jukka Suomela | Regarding questions that are closed too easily: I think it might be helpful to pick some good "borderline" cases and open new threads here on meta for each of them, and see if we can find a consensus; slight adjustments of our scope may be good every now and then. But to avoid hostilities, we should ideally choose some great questions whose only problem is that they are somewhat off-topic here. Then we wouldn't need to discuss the merits of the specific question; instead we could focus on discussing the scope of this site. | |
| Oct 10, 2011 at 19:33 | comment | added | Jukka Suomela | Thanks for raising this issue. In general I agree – I think this is a good reminder that all of us should try to be a bit more friendly and welcoming towards new users (and also each other...;). | |
| Oct 10, 2011 at 18:26 | comment | added | Noam | I'd rather not point out to specific questions as I don't want to point fingers at anyone specifically but just note an overly-critical attitude that was developing here. I am not bothered by closing decisions per-se but rather by the aggressive tone of some of the comments that suggest closing or just suggest that the person asking the question ought to go elsewhere. | |
| Oct 10, 2011 at 15:18 | answer | added | Aaron Sterling | timeline score: 7 | |
| Oct 10, 2011 at 9:58 | comment | added | Kaveh | I think the expectation was that a question needs to be related in some way to OP's research, and we might have applied that policy too strictly. MO seems to be less stricter than cstheory on this. We can be more open to questions which are not really coming from someone's research but are research-level (it would help if you add links to the questions you have in mind). ps: closing questions should not be a big deal, a question can edited and reopened by 5 high rep users. On the other hand, I agree that comments can be more polite and welcoming. | |
| Oct 10, 2011 at 7:17 | comment | added | Jukka Suomela | I would also like to hear more about the specific questions. I have also been recently involved in closing many questions, and I do admit that in "clear cases" my comments tend to be somewhat blunt. | |
| Oct 10, 2011 at 7:09 | comment | added | Suresh Venkat Mod | Could you point to specific questions ? I've also been noticing (and participating) in question closing of late, but there also seem to be a number of very elementary questions. Seeing examples might help indicate where there's a difference of opinion and how we might adjust our policies as needed. | |
| Oct 10, 2011 at 5:38 | answer | added | Tsuyoshi Ito | timeline score: -8 | |
| Oct 10, 2011 at 5:30 | history | asked | Noam | CC BY-SA 3.0 |