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I've just passed the 10k-threshold and now I'm a bit unsure on which questions I should vote to delete.

  • All questions I'd have voted to close anyway.
  • Only questions that are completely nonsense / noise.
  • Something completely different.

What do you think?

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    And now for something completely different. A man with a megaphone up his nose.
    – perbert
    Commented Oct 6, 2009 at 12:57

3 Answers 3

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Anything that has been closed is eligible for deletion.

Remember that deleting still takes a certain # of votes, so when you vote to delete, it is an implicit flag (as Ólafur Waage mentioned) to other 10k users that they might want to vote to delete it too.

I would remind you that sometimes closed duplicates are useful to keep around for the reasons outlined in this blog post:

https://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/04/handling-duplicate-questions/

And some general comments on the SO question lifecycle

https://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/04/the-stack-overflow-question-lifecycle/

The goal of deletion is to cull the worst stuff out and "trim the fat" so to speak.

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When you've just passed 10k, I suggest looking at the delete tab in the tools section. Check out what kind of questions have delete votes and what questions have just been deleted.

You can kinda get the feeling from it there. It's just something you learn, same with the close vote.

The questions that are deleted are usually nonsense and spam. But there are other things that are deleted, like questions that clearly don't belong here and anywhere else. Like how do you get a serial number for X.

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I'm new to this too. My rule of thumb is that I only vote to delete anything that is 100% trash (spam, rants, etc). That's just my rule - it doesn't apply to everyone else. I'll let the more experienced users and mods delete other questions.

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