What are the "rules" for deleting questions? And should “What does ‘TL;DR:’ mean?” be undeleted?

Question

I stumbled (to my utter amazement) on a question which was linked to a comment posted on Meta, namely https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/10659/what-does-tldr-mean

For those who do not have the rep to see deleted questions, it is as follows:

What does “TL;DR:” mean? [closed]

I found two different sentences that were prefixed by TL;DR:.

What does it mean?

TL;DR: "I've been here for quite some time, spent considerable time and effort in shaping the […]".

The question was asked by a high-rep user and was posted on Jan 30 '11 at 13:46 There were six answers posted in response to that question. The top answer received 59 upvotes. The entire question, along with its answers, was deleted by seven users on Sep 19 '12 at 2:02. Five of these are still very active today.

The reason it was first closed was because it was deemed as "general reference". The original wording was:

This question is too basic; it can be definitively and permanently answered by a single link to a standard internet reference source designed specifically to find that type of information.

Now, we should all be aware of the fact that a little over two weeks ago, an identical question was asked on EL&U: What does 'TL;DR' mean and how is it used?

Why wasn't that closed as "general reference" (especially by those very users who deleted the previous question)? Will that recent question plus its five answers be deleted one day? Until today, I would have argued that that was an impossibility, but I'm not so sure any more.

I ask because I once voted to close a question for being general reference—which it was. It had nevertheless received an excellent and detailed answer; the answerer was a newcomer who, being justifiably concerned, queried if his post was doomed for deletion. I reassured him that posts which had received at least one upvoted answer could not be deleted. Was I wrong? If the rules governing closure can be changed (as seems to be the case), is that good answer at risk of being deleted one day?

Furthermore, I strongly believe that the aforementioned TL;DR: question should be undeleted and marked—ironically—as a duplicate of the more recent one. If the original post hadn't been deleted, the second question would have been closed in an instant as being a duplicate.

I'm all for deleting GR questions that have accrued no upvotes and no answers in the space of, say, four weeks. They achieve nothing besides cluttering up the EL&U site; they should consequently be obliterated. Similarly, if the recent question was never (to the best of my knowledge) at risk of being closed, and it remains open to this day, then the older question should be reopened.

Answer 1

Duplicates are not bad. In fact, they're good:

There’s often benefit to having multiple subtle variants of a question around, as people tend to ask and search using completely different words, and the better our coverage, the better odds our fellow programmers can find the answer they’re looking for.

[...]

I wish people wouldn't delete questions with good answers. You're destroying the useful contributions of your peers!

Also, merging is a thing.

if there’s anything of worth in the answers, the question should be merged with another question rather than being deleted! ... I’m not necessarily advocating deletion, either; we want some of these merge stub questions hanging around so people can find two “identical” questions that were asked in two totally different ways. The exact, perfect duplicate question, in my experience, is much more rare than people think.

edit: Actually, it looks like no questions have been merged here since 2012, so maybe the mods have forgotten about it, or we mortals have forgotten (or never knew in the first place) that it can be requested. Let me repeat that last part really big so everyone knows:

Merging is a thing! The older question should be undeleted and the two questions should be merged!

Answer 2

I'm curious what the point of resurrecting the old question in order to immediately close it as a duplicate of the newer one.

It seems to me that we now have a canonical answer to the TL;DR question, that goes further than the original question or the original answers. The second question is higher-quality than the first. If we had never deleted the first, the second might have been closed and we'd have only the first set of answers instead of the second.

Even so, undeleting the old question won't help future visitors at all, as far as I can see.

It is strange that we can re-open the question while it is deleted, but not undelete it, but either way I see no reason to play with the old question at all. It was off-topic before, it's off-topic now, AND a duplicate of an on-topic question.

Answer 3

The original question simply asked what TL;DR means, which is beyond a shadow of a doubt General Reference. And it wasn't just closed by ELU mods and high-rep users - I'm not sure what's happened to now-deleted user "Will Hunting", but I think he is/was one of The Powers That Be within the entire Stack Overflow group of sites.

The second question (which I haven't closevoted) has at least some credibility, in that it could be seen as asking for more details about the "status" of the usage (is it acceptable in a formal context, for example?).

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Personally, I think the fact that over 100 users are prepared to upvote a meandering answer to that second question (with its pointless plethora of "not-so-funny" images) doesn't reflect well on ELU.

On the other hand there's an argument for saying it must reflect what many people want to see here - why else would they keep upvoting? If ELU mods or even higher-level representatives of TPTB within SO want to close/delete the second question they'd have my full support, but I don't see why I should have be the first one to stick my head above the parapet (I don't mind here on meta, because I assume most of the people who disagree with me are casual visitors to the main site, who are not so likely to read/downvote my words here).