2

I'll confess that I don't expect this proposal to get any real traction here, but I'll make it anyway because:

a) I believe the average "question quality" has deteriorated substantially over the past 12-18 months.

b) Reading and dealing with asinine questions consumes resources that could be better-used elsewhere.

I wonder if a few changes might improve things?:

1) Language should not be a barrier

Occasionally, a question that might suggest impaired cognition is actually a reasonable question, but the contributor's limited English skills have disguised this fact. Since RPi SE has integrated a "schematic tool" to aid communication, it seems that the addition of a "language tool" such as Google Translate could also be added to facilitate communication.

2) "New Contributor" questions should be placed in a Sandbox

The current system assumes all questions are reasonable, and they go immediately into the queue. Only afterwards - and then only if 5 contributors with sufficient rep vote to close the question - is it closed. Perhaps it would be better to put all questions from "New Contributors" in a sandbox for review before being posted in the New Questions queue. This could serve as a "carrot" to incentivize some thought and research before posting... we've seen the "stick" (i.e. closure) doesn't seem to provide a great deal of incentive, so it makes sense to try something else, no?

8
  • As I think you're aware, we don't have the power to do either thing here, and both of these involve actual retooling of the interface and site protocols. That means you need the ear of (and considerable help from) some SE employees, which probably requires community support on Meta.SE first. There's nothing wrong with discussion here before that, of course.
    – goldilocks Mod
    Oct 23, 2021 at 14:39
  • @goldilocks: Thanks for the feedback. I did wonder how much 'autonomy' we had here, and if it would extend to cover these items. I'd like to say that I'll take that up with the SE proletariat (the salaried ones), but tilting at windmills looks like a huge waste of time from where I'm sitting now.
    – Seamus
    Oct 23, 2021 at 18:58
  • I agree, but one thing that gets me is practically EVERY Question on this site gets a up vote, no matter how poor.
    – Milliways
    Oct 23, 2021 at 23:22
  • @Milliways: The 'Sandbox' could eliminate upvotes on the worst questions as they'd never reach the queue.
    – Seamus
    Oct 24, 2021 at 6:23
  • A Sandbox might work if there were enough users to actually check on it. Hardly anyone bothers to check the queues - only 2 users have reviewed the Close queue this month, so a Sandbox would prevent any new users from asking any Questions.
    – Milliways
    Oct 24, 2021 at 6:34
  • 1
    Most questions actually receive no upvotes (or more precisely, do not have a positive score) during their first few months. Here's a data explorer query for the average score of questions posted this month: data.stackexchange.com/raspberrypi/query/1497232/… It's ~0.61 (if you go back another month, 0.63), which if you take into account questions with a positive score > 1 means most questions are not upvoted when they are new.
    – goldilocks Mod
    Oct 24, 2021 at 15:06
  • @Milliways: That occurred to me also. I think the number of "approvals" would need to be less than 5 (as it is now to close a question). I'd also say that the default behavior would have to be to "promote" all questions after 2-3 days in the queue to prevent the sort of apathetic constipation you describe. Wrt the 'Close Queue': Visiting the 'Close Queue' may not be an accurate indicator of "participation" in question closures. And in general, I wonder about the effectiveness of the Review Queue in general. It seems to put the responsibility on "the usual suspects" instead of the OP.
    – Seamus
    Oct 24, 2021 at 15:21
  • Don't forget that questions can, and do, get upvotes without ever having appeared in a review queue.
    – Chenmunka
    Nov 26, 2021 at 13:06

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
2

Your option 2, the Sandbox, is possibly available in the form of the Triage review queue.

After the latest changes to the Review Queue System the Triage queue, which currently only exists on StackOverflow, could be made available to all sites on request.

To get the queue here, there would have to be community consensus. I don't believe that there is enough traffic on the Raspberry Pi site to warrant implementing this. Indeed, it only seems relevant for sites with much greater traffic.

1
  • @goldilocks: Whaddya' think?
    – Seamus
    Nov 26, 2021 at 18:35

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .