Should delete votes be limited like close votes?

Question

First off, let me say that I am not against deleting questions. I have done a fair bit of it in the past.

However, I think that when the same three or four people account for 80% of the deleted questions that I've seen recently, something might be amiss. (Names aren't important, but if you have 10k you can check the recently deleted list and see what I mean.)

Thing is, it's much easier for a borderline question (or a duplicate) to be deleted than undeleted, simply because you won't randomly run across it once it's deleted. And the consequences of overzealous deletion are worse than the consequences of overzealous closing, since information is being destroyed for the vast majority of users.

So I propose rate-limiting the deletion process like every other process on the site; my initial suggestion is 6 votes per day, but the exact number isn't important right now.

Answer 1

We had discussed this before, but deferred until there was a problem - it seems we now have a problem :)

The new rules (also apply to undelete votes):

• 10k rep users get 5 deletion votes per day on questions they don't own, increasing by 1 vote per extra 1,000 reputation up to 30 votes per day - deletion rules on questions one does own are still in effect.
• Popular questions require more deletion votes to be deleted, at a ratio of 20:1 - a question's popularity is defined as: question score + top-scored answer score. For example, a question with (question score 15 + top answer score 5 = 20) will require 4 deletion votes (3 base votes + 1 popularity vote).
• The maximum number of delete votes needed will not exceed 10.

Note that the above rules apply only to questions; answers take 3 votes, regardless of score.

Answer 2

I think they should increase the number of votes it takes to delete to at least 5 and maybe more.

We don't want to lose valuable answers.

Answer 3

+1

I think my question here: Stackoverflow - My Question Was Deleted As Duplicate, Despite Having Non-Dup, Complex, Useful Answers spawned this discussion.

The idea that a small handful of people are self-described janitors, who delete large numbers of things marked 'closed' without spending the time to read the entire thread and decide whether they should really be deleted (and just left as 'closed') boggles my mind.

In my example there, a question can be a duplicate, but have non-duplicate answers that are new, creative, explained differently, explained better, or more in-depth. What do our genius 10,000 rep janitors do then?

Answer 4

Look, someone's got to take out the trash. It's the way of the world that the few of us willing to use the tools to do the work get 'trashed' here as if we're on some kind of maniacal crusade. (The above sentence more for cheap joke value than to whine.)

As observed elsewhere, the current design of the 10K tools biases the process in favor of deletion somewhat, since incomplete deletions block the view.

As for merging, there's been a lot of recent discussion of it. Since that discussion started, I've started checking for fleas on questions closed as dups and marking for mod attention if there are possibly valuable answers. It would be really really helpful if I could see that someone else had already flagged a question in the deletion queue for the moderators.

A little bit of 10k tool engineering would make this problem go away, in my opinion: make the page show us separate lists of pending deletes by close reason.

Answer 5

I've never understood why questions should need to be deleted by actual people - if a question has been closed for a certain period (say a month) why not just delete it automatically? But deleting seems like just another harmless (but strange) hobby like re-tagging, and I don't see the need for any quotas.

Answer 6

I personally don't like getting limited to those abilities, so I have stopped deleting duplicates, but looks like people have their own thinkings, So I am voting this up to implement that.

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Edit: Now I got

You've reached the maximum of 3 Deletion votes per day; come back in 17 hours

_{A little bit sad though. :(}

Answer 7

Not to users with more than 8,000 reputation, moderators, or developers.

But for other users it depends on how much reputation they have.

Users with <10 rep get 2 as the limit.

Users with <50 and >9 rep get 4 as the limit.

Users with <300 and >49 rep get 10 as the limit.

Users with <2,000 and >299 rep get 30 as the limit.

Users with >1,999 and <3,000 rep get 40 as the limit.

Users with >2,999 and <5,000 rep get 50 as the limit.

Users with >4,999 and <7,000 rep get 55 as the limit.

Users with >6,999 and <8,001 rep get 70 as the limit.

And each of these limits are daily.

That's how it should be.

Answer 8

If a question has been closed as a duplicate, and if there are no comments suggesting why it's not actually a duplicate, then I'm likely to delete it. If you don't want it deleted, then take the time to say why is shouldn't be. You might even try saying why it shouldn't be closed.

Do so as comments to the question itself - I'm not going to read all the comments to find out why the OP thinks it's not a duplicate.