Should this question have been deleted?

Question

This question recently came up in chat, because a user lost reputation when their upvoted answer went overboard as collateral damage when its question was deleted:

Don't get me wrong, I think this is a dreadful question, and I think it was right to close it, but I don't think this should have been deleted. It's a bad question because it's just built on a large stack of misconceptions presented in good faith, but the response to that should be to answer with corrections to the misconceptions.

• Can the deletion voters explain their reasoning in this instance?
• Is there a site consensus that this sort of content should be removed, or that it shouldn't?
• Of particular note, the question had three upvoted answers with a total of eight upvotes between them, with answerer reps in the low thousands so they do feel the bite. Is there a site consensus that it's OK to remove low-quality questions that have decent upvoted answers?

Answer 1

Emilio asked that I turn my comment to an answer, so here goes, with edits, having responded to various comments:

Imo, what one should also be considering when voting for closure or deletion should be if it is a question that could often come up in search engines . I learned through the discussion here that closure does not take a question out of the field of engines and also that answers are still alive as far as reputation goes. If there is already a good answer, then I would not delete the question, reasons expanded below.

When I answer questions which are candidates for closure or even deletions, this is my criterion, that a clear answer would be found even for a nonsense question , if it is nonsense that may be often asked by high school children interested in physics.

Low quality posts may reflect an average non physicist's ignorance , those are the ones that I consider worth answering, to clear up confusions. A confused post is different than a post where somebody proposes own theories, those yes, I feel no compunction in their deletion, and the same for answers. But naive questions imo should be treated gently, particularly of new users of unknown sophistication in physics. It is possible to educate people, and one of the purposes of this site should be physics education.

I would set the question above on the naive side, somebody who has not understood special relativity.

If there is a good answer to the question candidate for closure, and the question is on the naive or confused side, then I would not delete it.

Now low or high quality judgement is peculiar to the comprehension of the reader. A naive question can be judged low quality as also a confused one. My preference is to be gentle, as we are now advised also, and to try at the same time to educate a general audience.

As physics becomes more and more esoteric due to complex theories, it is necessary to develop narratives that are correct and simple, understandable by people with just highschool level physics, again in my opinion. It is the level of the answers that characterizes the quality of the site, not the question itself, as far as I am concerned.

Not to forget the discouragement of the heavy guns on a new user.

I am reading a fiction on an apocryphon with a lot of bible quotes:

"Which of you, if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone?"

Answer 2

When I vote to delete, I judge based on the content of the question (in its current state), rather than the answers it's attained. Typically, if a question is

• sufficiently downvoted (e.g., $\leq-3$)
• closed for at least 1 week (so in actual closed state, not 'on hold')
• unedited since closure

it's, in my opinion, grounds for deletion regardless of answers: the content of the post is low quality & OP didn't make any efforts to improve it.

This website is not designed to answer any question posed, regardless of quality (if you want to answer any question posed, check out r/Physics or r/AskScience), we have standards (hence closure). Perhaps my standards of quality are higher than others (hence some of my reviewing stats?), I don't know. I do know that I'd rather not have -5 questions lying about for some hapless future users to think, "Oh, these people don't have standards, I can ask any old question" which I don't think is correct.

I would also echo AFT's sentiments about how answerers should handle low-quality questions (either don't answer it or improve the question).

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Looking at this particular case, I don't know that the answers would have swayed me anyway. The highest rated answer (+6) basically says, "You're wrong, it's the opposite of what you say. Go read a book" which, in my opinion, is a terrible answer (essentially a link-only answer with no actual link) and have no clue as to how it gained 6 votes; it should be DV'd and deleted anyway. One of the other answers seems to say the same (except the "go read a book" part) and another seems to be someone replying to one of the other answers (as if this were a forum). So we're basically left with only Árpád Szendrei's answer as being any good, in my opinion.

Answer 3

The question is terrible. This is a new user and I would rather not pile it on but I will say that, IMO the post in question, in its contents and its form, is harmful to the site.

This post is unusual because these days I do not initiate much closure - although I did on this one - except for homework questions, so I did find the question to be particularly bad, and sufficiently many agreed with me to close.

I did not initiate deletion: Kyle and AFT have given their reasons, which I generally agree with. I will briefly add that it’s not a good sign for a question when the most upvoted answer starts by stating that the premise of the question is false and, IMO, nonsensical; indeed that’s reason enough to contemplate deletion.

It’s a pity an engaged user lost some rep as a result of this but it happens.

Answer 4

The question contains a false statement. It should be fixed. Not fixing it would be terrible, because it had left a false statement on the site. But the question itself is not terrible.

The OP is not a QFT pro, but this site is exactly for questions like this.

In my opinion, the correct behavior had been to ask the OP for correction in comments. Or, editing his question (changing increase to decrease). After that, the question could have been closed as dupe, or answered as usual.

I see no reason to vote this question down or to close, and particularly not to delete it.

Answer 5

I reckon my standards are higher than average. I don't like low-quality posts to stick around, and I vote to delete them whenever I stumble upon one. Good questions do not make bad answers good, and good answers do not make bad questions good. Echoing Kyle, I don't look at answers when voting to delete questions, just like I don't look at the question when I vote to delete answers (well, of course I do, but mostly to understand the context; but the context will never redeem crappy posts).

I understand this will sometimes cause collateral damage. I don't feel too bad about it, for two reasons:

1. You shouldn't be answering low-quality/low-effort questions in the first place,

2. and if you do, at the very least edit the OP to make it less crappy so as to prevent deletion.

Right now, it seems Kyle, Zero, and I are the only ones going through low-quality questions and voting to delete them when necessary, so I think it is justified that we somewhat "aggressive": it takes three votes to delete a post, and there are only three people doing any voting.

But we are human, so we won't always get it right. Good thing the mechanics of this site allows users to fix these kind of issues: there are dozens of users that can vote to undelete posts that were deleted and should not have been. It's true that deletion/undeletion is much less visible than closing/reopening, something I don't quite like (I want more users voting to delete, and a reliable mechanism to undelete those posts that should not have been deleted in the first place). But do note that the "delete queue" is just as visible as the "undelete" one.

In any case, and given the size of this community, we are not yet at a point that the special cases cannot be handled here in meta or in chat. So I do not lose sleep over it.

So that is basically my reasoning. Maybe we got it wrong this time, and that post really should not have been deleted. (But this is the first time someone complains, so we are not doing a terrible job either). Please do vote to undelete if you think that's the right thing to do.