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Stack Overflow Moderator Election
- throwaway420 14y agoAnybody who promises to stop deleting and locking interesting questions on Stack Overflow gets my vote. Wikipedia has the same problem.
- DanBC 14y agoIMO Wikipedia is far far worse. At least SO is clear and honest and upfront about it, and they don't have megabytes of rules and guidelines and essays and etc to follow. I do understand the frustration of having good interesting questions closed. (Especially if it's for dumb reasons.) Wikipedia can feel very toxic. Even if you're avoiding the obvious hot-button topics.
- canttestthis 14y agoWhich policy do you have a problem with? I've been an active Wikipedia editor in the past and I think the problem has less to do with removing content, but rather maintaining existing content.
- carbocation 14y agoThe recent deletion of lutusp / Paul Lutus's article [1] seems to be a reasonable reflection of the problem with Wikipedia, in my opinion. [1] = https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Lutus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Lutus
- canttestthis 14y agoHave you read the discussion thread? [1] He doesn't have enough notability to warrant a dedicated article, and a redirect to the Apple Writer article is sufficient. And Paul himself chimed in asking for the article to be either deleted (which it was), or "frozen against vandalism", which is only applied in extreme cases. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Paul_Lutus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...
- carbocation 14y ago> He doesn't have enough notability to warrant a dedicated article You say this as if it were just so. I don't happen to agree.
- tptacek 14y agoWell, what are some citable sources on Paul Lutus that don't principally pertain to his having authored Apple Writer?
- shrughes 14y agoLook at some older versions in the page history (see https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:EnTerr/Paul_Lutus&action=history https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:EnTerr/Paul_...) before the page got whittled down before some deletion attempt, and you can find quite a few.
- tptacek 14y agoYou're right. I concede the point. It looks like there's some recency bias in WP's decisionmaking process here.
- jimrandomh 14y agoThis is kind of an embarrassing failure mode to have, since old-style forums figured out the solution years ago: don't delete anything, but move things to an "offtopic" section where it's less likely to be seen. That way you get the nicely curated (unmoved) content, avoid offending anyone, and allow discussions to continue rather than cut them short.
- dionidium 14y agoRight, the main problem here is that -- in many ways like the recording industry before them -- these guys are trying to apply all sorts of real-world analogies and metaphors to virtual problems. I get it. They were actually right about the broken-window theory. The demand for quality has had an enormously positive impact overall and they should get a lot of credit for that. But they routinely close questions that simply do not need to be closed.
- spolsky 14y agoI do agree that our community sometimes misapplies the rules. We study this regularly and are continuously working on tweaking and improving the moderation system to reduce the incidence of good questions which are closed. But trust me when I say that 98% of the questions that are closed are not anything you would ever want to land on as the result of a Google search. Look here and tell me what you think: http://stackoverflow.com/search?tab=newest&q=closed%3a1 http://stackoverflow.com/search?tab=newest&q=closed%3a1
- dionidium 14y agoThere's no doubt this is true (and I think I said as much). I agree that the dial should be there. We're just arguing about how far to turn it.
- saurik 14y agoExactly; way too often in arguments like this (such as with Wikipedia) people point at the places where something worked while totally ignoring the costs of false positives, as if the people who want "different" or "slightly less" moderation are somehow calling for "no" moderation... it's a total strawman.
- joelthelion 14y agoUnfortunately people like you and me don't have a voice on SE. I tried a couple times to defend this opinion on meta, but you get downvoted very quickly and people will recite the gospel of SE without even listening to your arguments.
- Smudge 14y agoStack Overflow should realize that they're actually the perfect platform for asking open-ended why questions. Not having a definitive answer is what makes many of these questions so interesting. Who would be harmed if those questions were left open (other than the anally-retentive)?
- eliben 14y agoIIUC, programmers.stackexchange.com is where "why?" questions should be asked. And IMO this sucks. I hate the SO fragmentation problem.
- dionidium 14y agoThe community doesn't really agree with that. It's a little more subtle: http://meta.programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/171/whats-the-difference-between-programmers-and-stack-overflow http://meta.programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/171/what...
- freework 14y agoprogrammers.stackexchange.com is even more deletionist that stackoverflow in my experience.
- noselasd 14y agoI absolutely support the somewhat firm hand that they employ to keep out open ended questions and discussions. I certainly believe this is needed to keep out all the garbage, and to keep places like SO from deteriorating into Usenet, or Slashdot. If someone wants a discussion, or slightly off-topic questions there's other places to do that, and SO is not obligated to accommodate everyone.
- spolsky 14y agoThat is not our opinion ;-) We believe that the highly open ended, conversational questions generate heat, not light. They are AWESOME and we LOVE THEM, but NOT ON STACK OVERFLOW. Stack Overflow is a place where you go to get an answer to a programming problem, and what you find there should be just that -- the answer to a programming problem. It's not an online forum or a place to discuss open ended "why" questions. There are a million of those on the Internet already. (Personally I'm a fan of a little site called Hacker News for this purpose... but I've never found the answer to a programming problem on Hacker News. And I've never found french fries at a Pizza store, and I don't fault Pizza stores for not selling french fries)
- dionidium 14y agoI agree, but these guys have had a lot of practice inventing silly metaphors [0] to defend their stance. It's a pretty big part of the culture. [0] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4273374 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4273374
- akavi 14y agoIt's worth noting that the deletionism is part and parcel of Joel Spolsky's community curation philosophy. He regularly gives speeches to that effect, so it's likely he and SO as a whole will weigh their influence towards maintaining it.
- spolsky 14y agoThis. Here's a video of the speech in question: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpGA2fmAHvM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpGA2fmAHvM We generally believe that it's important to keep the quality on Stack Overflow high, so that when you click on a stackoverflow.com result on Google, you can trust that you're going to get something good. That means that Stack Overflow is not just a host where anyone can type things into the Internet, and we host it. It's a curated environment.
- eduardordm 14y agoSO defines quality by rhetoric and writing style, not so much by content. Again, how can you define what is low quality if you are deleting baselines? I literally clicked randomly on a subject I know about to read a question and its answers: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15305764/angularjs-clear-input-text-with-button http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15305764/angularjs-clear-... The question is wrong, the answer is bad. Didn't get 'curated'. Now take this one, a very useful question, great answers. It was 'curated' and it's only there because of page views: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/194812/list-of-freely-available-programming-books/392926#392926 http://stackoverflow.com/questions/194812/list-of-freely-ava... SO should let us decide what is good or not, people don't like to be 'moderated'.
- dionidium 14y agoHere's what I think is happening. The moderators on SO have decided that there are certain classes of questions that are unacceptable and should be closed. I agree, so far. Now, that question is of that class, so it has been closed. However, there are exceptions. Normal humans are good at making exceptions and should have made one here. A certain type of personality -- one that's over-represented in engineers -- likes to create systems that don't have exceptions. They like to create abstractions. And then you get this. It's also why you have people who still organize their email, even though search obviates that problem.
- rwallace 14y agoPretty much, but really, there's not much point hoping for that as long as the people who actually own the site don't want it that way. What's needed is for somebody to set up an equivalent site with better moderation policy. I'd love to take a shot at that, but I'm up to my eyes already, I just don't have time. Probably the same is true of most people here, but if you ever run into anyone who is looking for a project, please point them to that idea.
- wfunction 14y agoI'll be looking for moderators who won't close "Why?" questions on the basis that knowing "why" doesn't solve an existing problem.
- rebelde 14y agoA popularity contest to choose moderators? I wouldn't run my forums that way. We would end up with the wrong people in charge.
- McGlockenshire 14y agoIt's not just a popularity contest. Each of the candidates had a dedicated comment discussion during the nomination phase. These comments were frequently focused on how the nominee already participated in the community moderation process. On the other hand, sometimes is really is a popularity contest. My number one pick is someone from the tag community I hang out with the most. I already trust his judgement.
- singular 14y agoI'd vote for moderators who punish people for answering:- X. It took me Y seconds to google your problem and find that solution. It'd save me downvoting every time I see that kind of ridiculous passive aggressive bullshit.
- eliben 14y agoFeel free to propose edits to such answers with constructive criticism. In practice, there aren't many of these on SO.
- singular 14y agoYou say that as if you know that for a fact, I've seen them over + over again (anecdote, but still), as well as many other such passive-aggressive responses. I often do take action on them, however the prevalence makes me think that not enough is done about the standard developer issue of people not knowing how to behave civilly to one another. Frustrating to be so downvoted for raising something that is so rotten by the way, presumably it's ok to talk down to somebody simply because you feel they haven't put in enough effort in asking a question? Or perhaps it was the language? That stems from being frustrated with the nasty culture that seems to be seeping in to so many corners of our development communities.
- Shog9 14y agoFlag those - and then select the "not an answer" option from the menu. "Google it" answers tend to be deleted pretty quickly by the mods.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- Encosia 14y agoShould be closed as not a real question and too localized.
- antman 14y agoA moderator that saves me from having to type long queries on google has my vote. I currently have to type: termtosearch site:stackoverflow.com "closed as not".
- freework 14y agoWhy does an upvote/downvote community need moderators? Isn't the whole point of letting users upvote and downvote content to avoid having moderator overlords?