Cap deletion votes at 20 for megaupvoted golden oldies

Question

So I've been following this deletion discussion for some time now and I think I see a possible resolution.

A lot of the upset from "my stuff being deleted" appears to be the apparent unfairness of a moderator acting unilaterally. As a moderator elsewhere, I certainly understand that these decisions are tough calls to make.

Ideally, moderators are human exception handlers. Jeff said so. Moderators should step in when the community cannot, and otherwise defer to the community.

And so we arise at a bit of a predicament with old, highly upvoted/answered questions. To prevent content being removed, the system increments the number of delete votes required to remove it, one per every 20 upvotes (I think). This is all very well, but it creates the situation where you see this:

233 votes to delete a question basically means only a moderator can make that call. So, welcome to being between the rock and the hard place: if the moderator does not delete, they will face community pressure to delete from those who believe it should be removed; if they do, they will make the twitterverse very angry indeed.

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Proposed solution: Cap the deletion votes required to remove any question at 20 (exact number to be worked out).

Justification:

• If a question gets 20 or so deletion votes, chances are community opinion is strong that it should be deleted.
• The deletion vote buffer is still wide enough that a question cannot trivially be removed if it received a lot of votes.
• importantly: the community not moderators, can remove these questions if they deem it so necessary.
• Even more importantly: moderators can justifiably say if you think it should be removed, vote to delete and know they're presenting the user with a way to have their voice heard.

In short, I believe that any SE site is run by us, and we need the ability to do our own cleaning (or not) and take the pressure off the moderators / put them back in the position of protecting us from ourselves (deletion wars).

Answer 1

There's now a cap of 10 votes on the required number of delete or undelete votes:

from here on out, it will take at least three and at most 10 votes to delete even the most popular questions, and an equivalent number to undelete them.

Source: https://blog.stackoverflow.com/2012/03/reputation-and-historical-archives/

Answer 2

It might be worth mentioning the history and reasoning behind why delete votes were changed to make it harder to delete popular questions.

A relatively obscure (and somewhat opinionated) functional programming question was answered by Eric Lippert, who (in his usual eloquent fashion) made it a teaching moment. The answer was wildly popular; since the question was already controversial it got a lot of views, and Eric's answer was upvoted many times.

This question was subsequently closed and deleted by the community, which unceremoniously dumped Eric Lippert's answer. An argument erupted between the deletionists and inclusionists. The deletionists said that it didn't matter how good the content was in the answers if the question was bad. The inclusionists took the position that it didn't matter how bad the question was; you don't destroy good content.

The argument became so contentious that Jeff Atwood actually purged the entire post from the database, but he agreed with the inclusionists' argument, and subsequently instituted the 20:1 rule.*

And here we are today.

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A lot of the butthurt stems from the fact that people are losing substantial rep from these questions when they get deleted. This is highlighted by the fact that it is very easy to see such deletions now, with the recent rep calc changes.

The problem with upvotes on these soft questions is that it is "unearned" rep, and everyone knows it. Reputation is supposed to be a measure of the effort you put into helping people with their programming problems, but these soft questions generate rep out of all proportion to the amount of effort, skill or knowledge required to answer them. These questions were never meant to accrue the kind of rep they do, which is the reason the community insisted on Community Wiki for them.

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So... Your deletion cap idea. I think it's a good one, and here's why: questions can get Redditted. Those kinds of votes don't speak at all to the quality of the content; all they do is measure how many views the question gets (and it's a lot: the legendary Regex question currently has 442,000 views. Most of the votes there don't really indicate how good the content is.)

I also think 20 is the right number for the delete votes cap.

*_{It's been awhile, so I apologize if my facts aren't completely straight.}