A +30 question closed as not constructive although there is much agreement it should be kept open? [duplicate]

Question

What core packages should a professional R developer have, and why? was closed and locked by a moderator with the remark "open a meta question on it and if we can reach agreement, it will be reopened"

I'd like to point out that this question had numerous up-votes and was actually flagged to be put as a community wiki, which is something completely different from being closed and locked. So I ask you very gently if you could please unlock and reopen that question, as:

• the people that are on the r tag are very appreciative about that question
• it is completely in line with a lot of other questions, as pointed out in the comments
• it is about programming and developing, and not a copy of another question like that
• closing of these questions directly lead to questions such as Stack Exchange site for R (statistics program not always used as a programming language)? and R-specific StackExchange site or greater integration of R community within CV?

Answer 1

I'll chip in with my 2 cents here since I feel somewhat responsible for the whole bruaha.

When you read the rest of this answer, bear in mind that this is just my opinion. It is by no means solid policy.

This question, while arguable might not be a poll, is still of a poll-y style.

If you're asking this:

What animals exists

Then it is not a poll, however it is an answer that will be list-y in nature. With disciplined people writing answers, you might end up with one conclusive list. Good.

If you're asking this:

What animals do you have

Then it is no longer a question about facts, it is about opinion, because you're inviting people to justify why they have those animals. Also, almost everyone will have different animals, so you no longer have 1 list, you have many, none of them more right or wrong than the others, unless you can argue that by no means should you have a Boa, that's just plain nonsense.

So let me look at the answers to the question in question (no pun intended):

This answer - What core packages should a professional R developer have, and why? - lists lots of libraries and tools, by no means things you absolutely need. Can you say someone else is wrong if he does not use/need/like those same tools?

This answer - What core packages should a professional R developer have, and why? - lists emacs as the answer. I daresay R does not really need Emacs, and Emacs is the answer to most programming tool answers. Should I down-vote this answer because I don't like Emacs? Because frankly, people are writing R code without it.

This answer - What core packages should a professional R developer have, and why? - lists Eclipse instead. How should I vote on this? That I like both Eclipse and Emacs? then what information pertinent to the question do I convey here?

This answer - What core packages should a professional R developer have, and why? - lists TextMate (for Mac) and Emacs again.

What about Notepad, Ultraedit, Notepad++, Notepad2, Textedit (on Mac), and all those other text editors. Are they good answers to this question?

The problem with such questions is that there is no way to judge an answer by itself, you invariably end up voting on how much you like the answer in particular, not how much right or wrong it is in relation to that question, because quite frankly, those answers are neither right nor wrong, they just are.

Additionally, most answers will list multiple things, because the question either explicitly asks for a list, or invites list-based answers. What if I think one of the things on your list is wrong, the other is correct? If I leave a comment, obviously I'm in no position to complain because it's your list, for you it is right. Should I down-vote, or up-vote?

Let me summarize why I personally think this type of question fit the faq on what shouldn't be asked:

They're bikeshed questions.

Everybody and their uncle that uses R will have a different list, there's no end in sight. Invariably people will stop bothering to say something because it has all been said, but the answers doesn't tell me anything. If someone asked "What's the best library for R to manage documentation", I would assume that @roxygen as noted in one of the answers, and possibly some variants/alternatives, are good answers, but the question is too open-ended. Since the answers here involve text editors and operating systems, even Excel, there is no shortage of possible answers.

Finally, my main gut reaction is when I see people commenting that the question is interesting. I have only seen a handful of questions where people say that where the interest-ness part of it is not related to discussions. In other words, whenever I see "this is interesting", people want to discuss.

And again, discussions are not what SO is handling.

Answer 2

The "Not Constructive" close reason has a long and illustrious history.

In the early days of Stack Overflow, almost anything even remotely programming-related was on-topic. Then the Great Community Wiki wars began, and the creation of the "Not Programming Related" proposal on Area 51 (now known as Programmers.SE) was an attempt to preserve these very popular questions elsewhere so that the main site could stay "pure."

In short, this is not a new issue.

There are many problems with "Not Constructive" questions, and it has taken a long time just to understand them all. But I think it boils down to two distinct principles:

1. Bikeshedding, and
2. er...Bikeshedding.

Bikeshedding occurs in the questions because, once you ask a question like "Tools for Professional R developers," you open the door for a nearly limitless supply of "Tools for Professional [your favorite technology] developers."

Bikeshedding occurs in the answers because, well, everyone has an opinion.

People like asking these kinds of questions because they are reputation magnets. There's nothing wrong with earning reputation, but reputation should be earned from concrete knowledge, not opinions; otherwise, it becomes a meaningless number. Reputation is supposed to be (more or less) a rough measure of your knowledge and your level of contribution to Stack Overflow, not your ability to solicit or provide opinions.

To put it another way, were the Wall Street Journal to operate on the principle of popularity, it would no longer be the Wall Street Journal; it would be the National Enquirer.

Ultimately, it's far less work for everyone if we just categorically disallow these kinds of questions.

Answer 3

it is completely in line with a lot of other questions, as pointed out in the comments

And therein lies a bigger problem. Not that all these answers about the dangers and general uselessness of list questions are wrong, mind you. But even if you ignore them, you have to admit that the usefulness of a question on the pros and cons of various editing tools are reduced when there are five of them.

If you click through those links, you'll see I've done a bit of house-cleaning for you...

Back to the question at hand. The top-voted answer is focused primarily on packages. The author has done an excellent job of explaining why he uses the tools he lists - this immediately makes it a much more valuable resource than most of the answers posted here. So let's go with that - I've closed the older question as a duplicate of the newer, and revised the newer question to reflect its new status.

If you (as a community) can come together and make recommendations based on experience while sharing the knowledge that makes the recommendation valid, you may produce a resource of value to other users. If this devolves into a bare list of links and opinions anyway... Well, read the other answers here. It will be killed with fire, no apologies necessary.

Answer 4

Every answer has "I" or "my".

It is the very definition of subjective, where everyone is encouraged to provide their personal point of view, all points of view are equally valid, repitition is common, and there's no single answer that deserves to be marked as the accepted, objectively correct, answer.

Further, this is not a single question - perhaps if you were asking, "Which R compiler allows me to access SSE3 instructions in an intel Core 2 processor?" then it would be a single question, with perhaps a few answers.

This one has, "List some R IDEs. List some R debuggers. List some R refactoring tools. List some R analysis tools. List some R..."

Stack Overflow is not designed to host such Katamari Damacy questions.

Feel free to write a blog post on R toolchains, but do not expect such a question to remain open on Stack Overflow.

Answer 5

It can probably be rephrased and reopened as a "Hidden Features of X" question.

It's indeed a special class of question, and like the Highlander "there can be only one (per language)" but historically it has been supported.

See:

• Should 'hidden features of X' be removed/closed/locked?
• Concerted Efforts to Close "Hidden Features of X Language" Type of Question
• Should all "Hidden features of XXX" questions be closed and locked?

Reading this question more closely, I don't think it fits the Hidden Features model; it's more of an Infinite List of X. I support leaving this question closed, re-opening the existing hidden features of R question and directing people to that instead.

Answer 6

I'm looking at this whole brouhaha as a user new to SO, and scratching my head. I see that there are cultural limitations here on how to address different classes of poll questions (yes, there are different classes of poll questions). However, the text for closure states We expect answers to generally involve facts, references, or specific expertise, and I think I can address each of these items. I'd also like to consider the handling of the question versus handling of the answers.

Regarding facts: Because R is evolving and not as complete as other environments, it is honestly the case that for some activities that typical developers may undertake, there is really only one option in R. Naturally, there are many editors. So, scratch those answers. When it comes to profiling R code, Rprof is pretty much the primary tool. When it comes to checking for certain qualities before R code can be publicly released (very, very few elite R developers release to anything but CRAN, by the way), then there are CRAN or R-forge specific checks. (Again, this differs from, say, C or Java, where there isn't one standard repository - R is intensely open-source and communal - at the moment.) The list could go on, but I'm not an elite R developer. I just have enough experience scratching my head and looking for "how do I do in R what I've done in language X", and find that there are either 0 or 1 solutions.

Regarding references, CRAN is pretty much the main repository for R stuff. There are a couple of other sites, like R-Forge (on CRAN) and BioConductor, but these really don't frame things. So, if there are tools, then users are looking for them on CRAN. Much of the community's documentation also exists on CRAN.

Regarding expertise, there is no more elite (or at least no more recognized) R developer than Hadley Wickham (apologies to Chambers, Ihaka, and Gentleman). If you look at R associated tags and questions on SO, many of the top ones relate to packages developed by Hadley. Hadley isn't the foundation of R, but he's a top developer of packages within the community. He's been down the development road so many times that he is even working on smoothing it for others.

Now, back to the handling of the questions and answers. Regarding answers: I believe that SO users and elite users (those people who downvote answers, delete answers, and other wickedness inflicted on us mere newbies) can properly handle the answers. The community will likely upvote and the author will likely select Hadley's answer, and it will be good.

Regarding the question: is it right to hammer a user for asking a question and do that in the face of all users? Given the balance of time and consideration that many users have made for this question, isn't it better to ask for a rewording? That can take just a few minutes by the author or by more experienced users. Just a few minutes by a few people is reasonable in order to avoid many "man-hours" of time wasted on meta discussions.

Personally, I've been most delighted when more experienced folks revised my questions. It guided me on basics, like code formatting, and more important matters, like focusing the question so that answers can be fairly adjudicated.

The original question can be revised, without affecting the answers. I believe elites (moderators and such) can behave more like mentors and guides rather than functionaries. That improves everything and everyone. Spending so much time on critiques of questions misses discussion of how one nudge things in the right direction.

Answer 7

"poll questions are off-topic throughout the SE network"

This has been said many times, and will be many more, and yet poll or list-of questions continue to be posted again and again throughout the network. Clearly, polls and lists are of value to the community, however, just as clearly, polls and lists do not fit in the Q&A style of SE. They break the model. Square peg, round hole.

Blog posts and chat also break the Q&A model and are excluded, however we have found a way to include them in the community resource pool by having them adjacent to the questions and answers. I think we need to do the same for polls and lists.

Answer 8

Much of the objection stems from what is meant by "poll", "constructive" etc., which are the reasons behind the Question being closed. Viewed from a particular point of view, I can see that this Question, and others like it, look like polls. I would argue however, that such a wide interpretation of the term "poll" could apply to a range of Questions/Answers where you could Answer the Question using packages or approaches A, B, C etc.

I don' see this Question and similar ones as being polls, because they can interpreted as asking for statements of fact. What tools are available for development in R? That is a clear question, with clear answers. Yes, this Question will garner more Answers than a big standard question, but number of Answers in an of itself should not be a criterion for considering closing a question.

Could the question to hand have been improved to remove some of the more subjective elements and to focus the Question? Yes, and myself and the other active members of the [r] tag community here could and should have been a bit more proactive in responding to the comments by the likes of Robert Harvey who pointed out the problem. Instead we my have got bogged down in the comment discussion. However, the Question has been closed and so we can't address this now. Could the Question be reopened to attempt to remove the more subjective elements?

As for the "constructive" element, I fully understand why we don't want flame wars and extended debates about whose language/editor etc is biggest. But it seems overly restrictive to assume that the more open-ended questions will descend to such depths and propagate unconstructive Answers and comments. By the very nature of people voting, commenting and defending the Question, I feel we have demonstrated that the Question is constructive and interesting and we've tried to outline in comments here why it is so. I feel we have answered the "constructive" part of the argument.

It does seem somewhat heavy-handed to close questions before they descend into argument/debate. In other areas, the SO site/community expect people to behave appropriately, leave comments when down-voting etc. And the sentiments expressed on Meta appear to be that the community doesn't want to micro-manage everything and dictate how people use the site in every respect. There is a bit of a disconnect between the way we expect people to use the site and the way moderation is performed with respect to the FAQ. Some might call it dogmatic at times.

What I would argue for would be to give posts the benefit of the doubt in such circumstances when moderating. Perhaps see how things pan out first before making a decision and deciding to close. Much like Robert Harvey's comment on the Question. We were perhaps naive in not addressing the issues Robert raised, but that naivety was more than likely due to our collective failure to realise exactly why this question might be viewed as being overly subjective. I don't think we will make that mistake again.

Answer 9

Like many in the R tag community, I'd strongly support this being re-opened. As not the sole proof but a compelling argument in favor of it's worth, I'd note that the leading answer mainly answers with R packages, functions, and techniques to be used.

As the close note states, "We expect answers to generally involve facts, references, or specific expertise." The answers have primarily involved all three.

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Moreover, I would argue that R is different from programming languages, even though part of R is a language that can be programmed:

• Its users are different (fewer programmers, a lot more statisticians and applied stats folks)
• Its applications are different. Traditional programmers write programs once, then release them upon the world, where they must work in a variety of circumstances. Statistical programmers are often the only users of their program.
• Partly as a result of the above two points, the questions R users have are different. On other parts of SO, basic programming knowledge is taken for granted. That's really not the case for many R question-askers.
• There's a lot of emphasis on visualization. Questions about graphic often feel more like "how do I use this piece of software?" than "how do I program this?"
• Many legitimate R questions need statistical or other background knowledge to help answer. A prime example of this is the gene parsing questions that keep coming up--they can be answered with strict programming knowledge, but topic-specific knowledge helps immensely. Another typical example is regression questions. These questions span the divide between CrossValidated and StackOverflow R tags at the moment.
• Because the emphasis is often not on producing programs but on producing answers to a particular problem, R programming often involves a very different workflow. Therefore, "What development tools are there for C?" may be no different than, "What development tools are there for Q?" but "What development tools are there for R?" is very different and necessary.

Answer 10

It belongs on Programmers, since it's not a technical programming question.