Can we find a resolution to this answers flaw?

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John D'Errico
John D'Errico on 31 Dec 2014
Commented: dpb on 1 Jan 2015
Far too often I see people have asked a question, gotten a clear, concise, useful answer, and then the asker goes ahead and deletes the text of their question.
So first, why do people delete the text of their questions? That action makes the answer useless for anyone else. One presumes the asker lacks the rep to completely delete their question.
- Are they ashamed that they did not know the answer to a question?
- Are they worried that their teacher will see that they asked a question about some homework?
- Do they somehow feel the need to "close out" a question after it has been resolved to their satisfaction, and since they lack the rep to delete their question completely, they just delete the text of the question?
- Does a student not want other students to somehow use what they just learned? I.e., make them work for it, even though I just got my answer for free?
- Was the question recognized to be wrong in some sense, perhaps like
This question deletion from today. Here the question was changed to read "Question was not correct, Sorry."
- Something else?
Deleting the text of a question essentially makes that question (and answer) completely useless to anyone else who might be able to learn from the resolution of this question, since the answer lacks context with no question behind it. It makes the answers site become like the game of Jeopardy - we need to figure out the question given only the answer. Or maybe some might be old enough to recall Karnak the Magnificent, or even one of his precursors.
We need to find a way to avoid this happening, otherwise, the answer you just spent an hour (or perhaps way more when you add in responses to comments) writing up is now wasted time on your part. While it may have helped that single person, the idea behind an answers site is to create a searchable database of answers, from which others can benefit too.
If the question text gets deleted, should the entire question be removed from the database? Of course, then the person(s) who spent all that time answering the question will see all their effort completely lost.
So, my real question is, how should Answers be modified to induce the asker to not do this? I have some ideas of my own, but I'd love to see what others think.
  10 Comments
John D'Errico
John D'Errico on 1 Jan 2015
Edited: John D'Errico on 1 Jan 2015
I don't have a problem with edits that are minor. Thus fixing code to be readable adds no information content. An editor should be someone who catches errors, but never adds content. If as an editor, I materially change what someone else has written though, then it is no longer truly their work, but a collaboration.
The problem is that Answers does not show what changes were made by who. In fact, if more than one change is made, it only currently tells you who made the very last change, and it says nothing about what change was made.
I'll admit that heavy handed editors were a factor that contributed to my decision to leave StackOverFlow.
dpb
dpb on 1 Jan 2015
...heavy handed editors were a factor that contributed to my decision to leave StackOverFlow...
Never looked in there, even, but here if I do modify more than reformat or spelling I'll leave a note that did so...just had that occur a few days ago where I THOUGHT I knew what OP was asking so recast his query a little to match.
Again, if had the threaded view, stuff would be there in sequence w/o any real effort.
Difficult in interactive forum if anybody but the author has the facility to edit to prevent unless it is a very limited and selective group of editors which makes it back to what TMW has tried to avoid of having to support it all with their own resources and make it "official"
As mostly a contributor rather than asker, it doesn't bother me personally but if were a more intensive sort of contribution I suppose it could/would if somebody were to really seriously mung upon a contribution. I'd reserve that kind of input to File Exchange or the like, however; this is "throwaway" entertainment rather than anything more to me...

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Answers (2)

Chad Greene
Chad Greene on 31 Dec 2014
As for reasons folks delete their questions, I assume homework is a common one. I am not in school, but I admit I have been tempted to delete some of my own questions. I am constantly embarrassed by how little I knew six months ago. I am am not proud of the content of questions I asked six months ago or how I phrased them. And six months from now, I will not want my December 2014 self to represent the understanding I'll have by June 2015.
It takes a certain amount of courage to speak up and ask a question. Some folks struggle with this more than others, and it can be hard knowing that your own vulnerability becomes documented in a publicly-searchable permanent record. I wonder if this is more of an issue for users who do not use an alias.
Another motivation for deleting questions may be rooted in paranoia. When I worked in private industry I asked a number of work-related questions on the MrExcel forum. I'd generalize my questions and I would not even divulge what field of work my question applied to, yet, in the back of my mind I always worried that a colleague could find my question and think I was publishing proprietary information. Now I work in academia/research, and applications are highly specific. If I ask questions about how to work with certain glacier-related data sets, it feels like I am giving a leg-up to my research competition.
It's not necessarily excusable, but it's certainly understandable that some users do not want a permanent, public record of every question they ask. Of course TMW would like to have a highly-skilled labor force providing thousands of hours of unpaid work to build a comprehensive database of Matlab-related questions and answers, but does TMW's goal of free labor mean no one can ever ask a simple ephemeral question again? There are stupid questions, and we all need to ask them sometimes. For anyone who does not have office mates who know Matlab, this forum may be the only community they know where they can ask those dumb questions. Sometimes I'd like to ask a dumb question without it sticking around forever.
I agree with Image Analyst that editing-away an answer is disrespectful. To me it indicates that the asker does not recognize the effort or thought that respondents put into their answers. Worse than simply not responding, not saying thank you, or not accepting an answer, editing-away a question comes across as active disrespect. Yet, where it comes from is certainly understandable.
  2 Comments
dpb
dpb on 31 Dec 2014
Well considered and some valid points...but as for the "newbie" embarrassment, while real as a self-perceived issue, I'd submit that even the most experienced posters here were also once in the same boat. How "green around the gills" they were, specifically w/ Matlab at first has a very strong correlation with how early in their careers of programming in general they were at the time. Here it's quite clear that many are seeing a computer for the first time as anything other than their phone or the like so it's all completely foreign. Others who have had significant other programming experience first have a far different level of overall expertise but still may be pretty weak in Matlab syntax and colloquialisms just as for (;;) in C looks pretty much incomprehensible to a Fortran expert on first blush (altho likely would infer the meaning in context after a little thought).
Ryan
Ryan on 31 Dec 2014

I agree that posting stupid questions can be embarrassing. Believe me, I have some of my own. But I feel that most people viewing a dumb question have no room for judgement, as they probably have the same dumb question. If someone really is embarrassed about being judged, no one will know who they are if they use an anonymous user name. As for giving a leg-up to your research competition, if you really need to consult a public forum for help, it should go public. You're essentially getting free help from an anonymous person who will receive zero credit for your discovery. Not coming up with a solution on your own is an unfair advantage over your competition in my opinion.

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Image Analyst
Image Analyst on 31 Dec 2014
Maybe make it like a wiki, where you can store the older revisions in a tab so people can go back to refer to them, or possibly revert to them, if desired. I think editing away your question is disrespectful and I just black list the author. I don't have to answer them anymore but I don't really feel like I should have the power to supersede them. I mean, why is my desire for the post to stay necessarily any more valid than their desire to get rid of it? Sure it's disrespectful but why should my desire prevail over theirs. I think I should just control my behaviour, not that of others, and by that I mean I can choose not to answer them anymore. One of the advantages of Answers over the newsgroups is the ability to edit posts, as well as a cleaner look that is less cluttered with quoted past responses. So the bad (letting users edit away their post) is just the cost of having the the good (editing). A wiki style discussion group may be a compromise.
  1 Comment
dpb
dpb on 31 Dec 2014
OTOH, the fact that a newsgroup does have the preceding plus (hopefully with judicial snipping) the responses is one of the reasons I still prefer that format. If could combine the two would be a_good_thing (tm) imo...let use an enhanced newsreader for attachments, formatting, images, etc., and wrap that into the search engine. Some structure of that nature was what I advocated for back when TMW was broaching Answers initially.

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