Recently we've got a lot of new users and, consequently, a lot of answers that repeat or translate already existing answers. What should we do with them? Close, merge, add comments that tell what's wrong and hope that the author of the answer will remove it?
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See also this question. :)– Alenanno ModCommented Nov 9, 2012 at 21:16
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3 Answers
- I do not find duplicate answers bad, let alone translations.
- For duplicate answers, I suggest just ignoring them. If a new answer does not add anything but is not wrong, let it stay there. The best answer will remain at the top, so the page will serve its purpose. At the same time, the new "contributor" will feel him/herself involved and may in the future contribute better answers. If we downvote these first attempts, we will push people away from the site.
- The really bad answers (meaning either low quality or wrong) should be downvoted. Additionally, they may be flagged for deletion.
- Often newbies do not understand the principles of SE, and post an answer where a comment would have been appropriate. I believe this is due to the fact that SE is relatively little known in the Russian-speaking community (because many Russians are reluctant to use non-Russian language sites even if they can read English). In these cases I suggest careful moderation and explanation of the rules.
- Additionally, I suggest adding a section on answering to https://russian.meta.stackexchange.com/faq and link to it when commenting a poor newbie answer.
P.S. Olga, thanks for drawing our attention to the problem. I'll try to get back in business and help.
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I disagree that ignorance is enough. I do believe that answer containing no additional value compared to other questions are not that harmless, since they are increasing entropy. The experience of reading answers is very important. Let us say we have one perfect questions with 3 nice answers. Imagine now we have one perfect question and 20 non-informative answers. I bet you'll feel like the question itself is not that perfect.– shabunc ModCommented Nov 9, 2012 at 7:53
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I have developed a different strategy. I do not downvote repeating answers any more. I mark repeating answers with a comment. This comment contains a suggestion to upvote the answer that already exists or to change the new answer so that it provides some new idea that has not been said before. If the person doesn't react within a day, I remove the duplicate answer.– Olga ModCommented Nov 9, 2012 at 9:10
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Let us also revive the "What should our FAQ contain" question and add more to it.– Olga ModCommented Nov 9, 2012 at 9:16
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@shabunc, from my experience on the other SE sites, I feel more assured about the correctness and completeness of the best answer when other people basically repeat it. It shows that I can relax and stop searching for other solutions. At a language SE site, I would understand if visitors appreciated simple short not very informative answers of "usual people" in addition to Quassnoi's elaborations on any topic, with a dozen of references and a language, which requires the use of a dictionaty to understand all the grammatical terms :) However the answers should not be a spam.– texnicCommented Nov 9, 2012 at 15:19
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@texnic: wow. Does it really look that way? :) I usually just try to cover the topic better!– Quassnoi ModCommented Nov 9, 2012 at 20:06
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@texnic I have found a section in the common part of FAQ for SE sites that tells that "exact duplicates" should be removed. I guess that it means that we still will have to remove answers that don't include any new information.– Olga ModCommented Nov 9, 2012 at 21:02
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@Olga: Nothing personal but --- prooflink please. And if it is the case, then your question is answered, isn't it? :) Then we just accept this as a site rule.– texnicCommented Nov 10, 2012 at 11:02
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@Quassnoi: Well, it may be personal, but that's the reason why I am not a frequent visitor here any more :) You answer all questions so quickly and so elaborately, that there is no chance to add anything. At the same time I do find reading grammatical texts somewhat challenging. I believe it's excellent to have your answers here and at the same time some simpler explanations to "translate" them :)– texnicCommented Nov 10, 2012 at 11:05
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@texnic What I personally find convincing about some answers is that people in other answers say something like "the answer by X is great" or "X really nailed it down" and then add some details or another solution for some particular case.– Olga ModCommented Nov 10, 2012 at 11:43
Taking into account that at least the three people involved in this discussion do not come to exactly the same conclusions, I suggest the following. The problem has appeared, we agree on it. Let's try to solve it, however each of us wants it. I don't think we need to come to a single solution. We have exchanged a few ideas and points of view, but each of us can go on doing different things. In case of flagging, the admins have the final word anyway. And we can also down-vote answers if we find it appropriate. After all, each answer is unique, and a general solution may not exist. In a week or so we can see if we have achieved our goal of making this site a high quality SE. If not, we can discuss it again.
Personally I downvote such questions if I see that no attempt was made to contribute something new. I don't think that any additional actions had to be taken in most cases. Down votes teach those who want to be teached pretty fast. At least they always can see what type of answers community find valuable.
I'm much more confused with tens of a-priori irrelevant answers, containing jokes, which can hardly be found funny, wrong, commonplace and trivial. These questions, I believe should be flagged.
ps To be honest, I'm a bit suspicious. It feels like somebody have an intention to compromise this service by flooding extremely low quality answers.
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Actually, there are interesting answers, too. As for the irrelevant jokes, just flag them as spam, off-topic or offensive, whatever you feel is the most appropriate. Such "answers" will be deleted.– Olga ModCommented Nov 8, 2012 at 8:37
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interesting answers should be up voted, the rule is common) it's just that personally me found about 80% of new answers very raw.– shabunc ModCommented Nov 8, 2012 at 8:42
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Actually, I think that downvoting will not work and it is not exactly the correct use of down votes. Why does one answer get a high score and another one a low score, and both answers are the same? I'd do the following thing: add a post notice or a comment, and then if the user didn't correct the answer suring a day or two, delete it. If the answer is very poorly formatted, is hard to understand or is offensive, I'd delete it right away.– Olga ModCommented Nov 8, 2012 at 22:27
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Downvotes may be not effective in terms of reputation, because if the answer is relevant, someone can upvote it. To balance upvote you need to downvote the answer 5 times, otherwise the user will have positive reputation. I myself saw a bad answer to a highly voted question that had positive reputation effect even after 7 downvotes. Without such answer removal the user would see this as a good strategy to earn reputation points without much effort.– ArtemixCommented Jul 23, 2013 at 14:36