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I post this meta because the mod I discussed this with to told me to. There's this "The Great Retagging Event" on Chemistry Meta, where they hunt and retag a bunch of questions within a fixed duration. This helps to keep messing up the "active feed" to a minimum duration. In their words:

Editing questions bumps them up; and somehow surprisingly, there's a good portion of chem.SE users who only use the 'active' tab. Thus, bumping too many questions would stop newer questions from getting the needed attention. Thus, the frequency of retagging must be small.

But people just can't keep up with editing 1 question every ten minutes. They can't be consistent, and they're not to blame. Hence, if the only way we can keep editors helping is by flushing down the 'active' tab, let's do it in an organized way, in a small frequency.

I propose something similar:

  1. Schedule cleanup events (weekly/bi-weekly/monthly...)
  2. Edit your own old posts (to update/improve/retag/expand...)
  3. Meanwhile, improve other posts that you chance upon without listing them on meta for others. (also close/flag/delete...)
  4. ELU gets closer and closer to utopia.

I won't be able to plan/host any of these myself due to reasons I can't tell now. I want the moderators/high-rep-users to come forward for the sake of the community and design a good cleanup program and make this thing a reality.

What are your thoughts?

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    I want the moderators/high-rep-users to come forward for the sake of the community and design a good cleanup program and make this thing a reality. Perhaps they lack the time or the energy to do what you want? Perhaps they don't want participating in this website to be too much like a chore? We're supposed to have fun here, we're not paid. If you enjoy cleaning up, then by all means do so, but I suspect many others don't always enjoy it. Perhaps this sounded a bit unfriendly: I'm sure you only want what's best for the site, and I applaud you for that.
    – Cerberus - Reinstate Monica
    May 31, 2016 at 20:18
  • @Cerberus Thanks. I know mods don't get paid, and I was not putting this on them forcefully, but merely recommending. They know the site in and out, definitely something that will help design a good cleanup program.
    – NVZ Mod
    May 31, 2016 at 20:24
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    No one gets paid to edit other people's posts. No one gets paid to research and post detailed questions and answers. And you're suggesting that users should organise (how?) among themselves something which you yourself don't have time for? I call that being "cheeky". Users are not paid to clean-up, those who can, will. Those who like doing this, will. Those who can't, won't. Those who don't want to, won't.
    – Mari-Lou A
    Jun 1, 2016 at 6:36
  • Re: Chemistry Meta, tagging a post requires much less time, care and attention than editing someone's poor English and LQ post.
    – Mari-Lou A
    Jun 1, 2016 at 6:49
  • @Mari-LouA I'm not sure if I've got the message across clearly, maybe it's my poor wording. Anyways, thanks for sharing your opinions.
    – NVZ Mod
    Jun 1, 2016 at 6:49
  • @Mari-LouA Well, first of all, if you paid more attention to point 2, I said "edit your own old posts, and that's more important than editing others'. You don't need payment to improve your old posts, which could be thousands.
    – NVZ Mod
    Jun 1, 2016 at 6:51
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    I don't get paid for anything I do on SE, so anyone pointing out the "not paid" thing adds nothing new to the discussion. We're here because we share an interest, an interest in helping others learn the language, and also have fun. :)
    – NVZ Mod
    Jun 1, 2016 at 6:59
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    You don't need payment to improve your old posts, which could be thousands. Thousands? The posts that need improving on are the LQ posts. The edits you have been doing on your previous efforts are ones based on aesthetics, which is fine, don't get me wrong. Neater posts are more pleasing to the eye etc, but that's not where the problem lie. We're talking about the thousands of sub-par posts abandoned by newcomers. And the thousands more to come.
    – Mari-Lou A
    Jun 1, 2016 at 7:00
  • @Mari-LouA Although I often edit for aesthetics, I also add "everything required" to make one-liners real answers.
    – NVZ Mod
    Jun 1, 2016 at 7:07
  • Yes, well I paid more attention to point 1: Schedule cleanup events and point 3. Meanwhile, improve other posts... You're "suggesting" what could be done, which is fine, but then you back down by saying you can't do it personally. Well, don't you think users who care, and have that kind of free time, aren't already doing this? And those who don't, can't for a variety of valid reasons.
    – Mari-Lou A
    Jun 1, 2016 at 7:08
  • @Mari-LouA Planning events and participating in them are two different things. I can participate, not schedule them. The schedule can be arranged through chat/meta by those with info about peak number of online users on the site, etc.
    – NVZ Mod
    Jun 1, 2016 at 7:10
  • @Mari-LouA Since there isn't such a window to edit my own previous posts, I stick to editing 2 a day, which is slow as a snail. If I edit more, I might flood the "active feed". I'm sure there are others who wish to improve their old posts.
    – NVZ Mod
    Jun 1, 2016 at 7:12
  • I notice that you didn't emphasize tag editing like is done in chem.SE. Why don't you think the same supporting arguments for tags there hold here?
    – Mitch
    Jun 1, 2016 at 12:51
  • How is this a duplicate of 'how to improve question quality'? This is entirely a call to improve quality by a specific means, and that means is being judged, not the general idea. THere's a difference between 'already asked' and 'disapprove of the question'.
    – Mitch
    Jun 1, 2016 at 12:53
  • @Mitch Please help reopen it. I accidentally clicked on some banner at the top.
    – NVZ Mod
    Jun 1, 2016 at 12:54

2 Answers 2

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I review and clean up posts I've asked or answered, but rarely and on no particular schedule. Also, I star posts I want to review later, and I review these starred posts, again rarely.

A scheduled event might motivate me to do this more often, but I can't promise I would do it exactly on the proposed day and time because of work and family schedule.

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  1. The first question on Chemistry SE (CSE) was posted on Feb 17, 2012 and it has a total of 15,381 questions (average 9.8 questions per day) as of now. In contrast, ELU's first question was posted on Jun. 16, 2009 and it has a total of 71,304 questions (28 questions per day). CSE is far much slower than ELU in terms of number of questions. It could be a factor that enables them to do it on a regular basis.

  2. The CSE retagging event seems to be more focused on tags. For ELU, nobody seems to care so much about tags. I personally think there are too many tags (272 tags on CSE vs 1,102 tags on ELU) and we rarely use many of them. I don't think tags are very important as long as we have high-quality questions and answer as we can search using the right word or terms without having to depend on tags.

I think we have many dedicated users who try their best to improve the quality of ELU's questions and answers. They will undoubtedly continue to do so without such a regular event. Let's keep focusing on dealing with low-quality questions and answers. I do believe we need a regular Meta post on both of them.

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  • Good points. Unlike Chem, we're huuuge. We have the capacity to simply do away with any number of low quality posts instead of improving them, which is convenient. I suppose this idea of mine has failed.
    – NVZ Mod
    Jun 1, 2016 at 13:17
  • You should see this. Maybe some of us could start a chat room and coordinate regular cleanup events.
    – NVZ Mod
    Jun 1, 2016 at 19:17

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