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
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.