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This question and its answer are an example of what I mean .

The title is interesting and it will be caught by a search engine:

Do Physics concepts build on top of other concepts?

The content is about difficulties of a student, answered adequately in the comments. There is one answer that is not a real answer to the title and a wishy washy for the content of the question.

In addition the questioner has not appeared in the site since 2013 a week after asking this question and the answerer has over a year to appear on the site.

If the final objective is to have a good reference for physics questions for future aspiring physicist coming up with such a question/answer defeats the point.

One might answer the title question but a searcher might come up with just the question and dismiss it because it is obvious a student question, and never, look at the more general answer.

Maybe some judicial moderation would be useful, deleting similar fluff?

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    $\begingroup$ Anna, your link goes to a recipe for cooking artichokes. $\endgroup$ – John Rennie May 12 '15 at 5:33
  • $\begingroup$ @JohnRennie thanks, I corrected it. I had just started cooking :) $\endgroup$ – anna v May 12 '15 at 5:36
  • $\begingroup$ Anna, I would be interested in the artichoke link too. $\endgroup$ – Alfred Centauri May 13 '15 at 2:16
  • $\begingroup$ @AlfredCentauri That was in greek and about steaming wild artichokes for easier cleaning. Here is the recipe of what I cooked cooklikegreeks.com/en/recipes/… $\endgroup$ – anna v May 13 '15 at 4:23
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Speaking on behalf of the moderators: in general, we try not to delete things (questions and answers) manually, unless they are spam or offensive. The system will automatically delete posts satisfying certain criteria, and we think those criteria are good ones to use to draw the line about what should be deleted.

So the best way to have questions like this deleted is to downvote them.

That being said, there could be occasional exceptions. Off the top of my head, I'd say probably having a meta post about it, or mentioning it in chat, is a good idea, so that anyone who can think of a reason not to delete it can speak up, and then if there are no objections after a little while, we can go ahead and delete the post.

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  • $\begingroup$ One solution in this case would be to edit the content , changing the level to be commensurate with the title. Am I wrong that the final objective is to have a reliable data base for future searches? $\endgroup$ – anna v May 12 '15 at 5:53
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    $\begingroup$ You're right that the long-term goal is to have a searchable database of sorts, but in this case specifically I think the question is just off topic, regardless of whether you consider the title or the body. And besides, if there's a mismatch between the title and the body, we generally take the body as a better representation of the OP's intent, and edit the title to match, not the other way around. $\endgroup$ – David Z May 12 '15 at 6:21
  • $\begingroup$ this then could be a solution for this specific case. $\endgroup$ – anna v May 12 '15 at 6:25
  • $\begingroup$ Concerning certain criteria, see this meta post for details. In the case at hand, the post wasn't deleted because it has answers. $\endgroup$ – Qmechanic♦ May 12 '15 at 12:53

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