We have two tools for community moderation of questions: downvotes and close votes. Both are used to indicate a question is not "good", yet they work in isolation. Why is this?
The tooltip for a downvote says:
This question does not show any research effort; it is unclear or not useful.
I downvote questions that I don't welcome. Either because they are unclear (which ties nicely to a close reason) or because they show no research effort (not a close reason, but desired by many).
If a question has reached a score of -5
, -7
or -10
, is this really a question that should be open? It will probably be closed eventually, for reasons relating to the downvotes, but why do we have to act twice? Note: these scores are just examples, clearly different sites would have different typical scores for poor questions.
I'm beginning to wonder if a low question score should trigger a question to be on hold. I haven't figured out the finer details yet, it's just an early thought. But I wanted to start a discussion about the pros and cons of keeping the two moderation tools separate, as they are now. I'm not suggesting we do away with close votes, I'm just questioning whether a low question score is another way a question could be closed.
Based on a simple SEDE query looking at Stack Overflow, it seems there are thousands of questions with a negative score that are still open:
Score Open Questions =========================== -4 17,258 -5 7,116 -6 2,983 -7 1,322 -8 693 -9 261 -10 189
Does this data mean anything? I'm not sure. It perhaps proves there is a benefit to having open questions with a low score. Or perhaps this shows just how many crap questions could be closed if an auto-closure system kicked in.
Here's a similar query but for questions with at least one answer. The numbers are smaller but still significant.
-5
Stack Overflow question that is really worth keeping open. We have data from the votes - people think this question sucks. I'm just wondering if that should feed into what happens to that question (beyond stuff like auto-deletion, in the future).