When we created this site, I made the executive decision to import all our content from Stack Exchange instead of starting with a blank slate. I did that for a few reasons:

• We have a lot of good content there, and we should continue to have ready access to, and curate, that content.

• I felt there would be a stronger incentive for SE users to come here if they could bring their work here. Having some of your content there and some here would be a pain, and I feared we'd lose some people because managing two sites is a hassle.

• I wanted there to be a front page full of questions when we invited people here.

I considered asking ArtOfCode to run queries that would pull in only some of the content, like only upvoted non-closed questions or only questions with answers or other things. But that could get complicated (especially when we still want people to be able to have all their content if they want it), and Art was already doing us a big favor in setting up this community for us while we wait for the Codidact software to be ready.

We now have people here (yay!), and as we look through existing posts and (re)cast votes (¹) and edit, we're seeing that there is in fact a lot of stuff here. And a lot of it is good, and we should give it the attention it deserves! And some of it is, maybe, not so good, and we should give it the attention it deserves too.

What I, and I think some others, have been doing is to kind of meander through the site, reading and voting. I've tried to review all the answers to all of my own questions, and in the process made some improvements. I also use tags as a starting point, though I'm nowhere near through all the questions on my favorite tags yet. And sometimes I just pick a page of questions and go. I encourage others to do any or all of these, too.

But my question is: how should we be curating this content?

Specifically:

• What should we do with questions that were closed at the time of import? I reopened one yesterday, but most should probably stay closed. Some of them are of historical significance (we don't have locks here yet, sorry) and some were well-received if ultimately closed. At the other end of the spectrum, there might be some that have no answers or are downvoted, and maybe those should be deleted -- they can be re-asked if applicable.

• What should we do if we come across answers that don't answer the question or are link-only answers? We have a couple moderator flags about this already, which we haven't handled pending some community consensus.

• Assuming Art is willing to run some queries, should we do any systematic culling, and if so what? (Downvoted unanswered questions?)

• How does our community feel about moderators making unilateral deletion decisions? We don't have auditing tools for this right now, but we can keep a list of deleted posts here on meta and lower the rep threshold for being able to view them. (That threshold is currently 1000, which nobody has.)

• Other issues or suggestions?

(¹) When we imported the content we reset scores to zero. We did this for two reasons: first, we do not have access to data about who voted, so we can't track your individual votes from that content. Second, we felt that in this respect a new site called for a fresh start, and that the people here should cast the votes that affect the ranking of the content here. We have the original scores available (though not, I think, the upvote/downvote split); if you think we should revisit this decision, please raise it.

posted almost 5 years ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

5y ago

Monica Cellio‭ staff

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