Should closed questions be deleted?

Question

The moderators have been cleaning up and deleting closed questions. While in principle, this is good to keep the site clean, it has the huge negative effect of reducing our hard earned reputation. I answered the questions in good faith, but now I've lost more than 100 reputation points. I know that in CSTheory.SE, we only ever deleted spam, but almost never deleted questions.

In my opinion, closed questions (with up-voted answers) should not be deleted. It is not a bad idea to keep closed questions around, for the following reasons:

• Closed questions quickly fall down the list and do not appear on the front page.
• Closed questions provide a record of what questions are not on topic.
• Closed questions can also be referred to if the same question appears again, thereby avoiding any debate or disgruntled feelings.

Can someone point me to where in the SE general policy or in the CS.SE policy it states that closed questions will be deleted? Should (non-spam) closed questions be deleted by moderators?

After doing a little investigation, I found the following on this page http://cs.stackexchange.com/privileges/moderator-tools:

Closed questions that are of no lasting value whatsoever should be flagged and deleted.

One of the deleted questions was Why does Knuth persist with MIX/MMIX?. This is the kind of question that could reappear. It's a natural question, even though it was judged to be off topic. Leaving the question around would be useful for other people who wish to ask a similar question, or even those who ask questions about what is in the mind of some author when they wrote some paper or book.

Answer 1

There is a general Stack Exchange policy, expressed in two of Jeff Atwood's blog posts:

• Adventures in Delclusionism
• The Stack Overflow Question Lifecycle.

But a closed question is no longer alive in any meaningful way, and certainly well on its way to the bit-bucket of /dev/null.

Let me be clear: we do not seek out deletion, by any means. But we believe not having the guts to cull some of your worst content is much, much more dangerous to your community than letting it sit around forever in the vague hope that it will magically get better over time.

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Why would you delete a question? Isn’t closing it enough?
(…)

• If users see a lot of closed questions, they’ll note that we don’t enforce the guidelines, so why should they? Without any final resolution, asking questions that get closed becomes something we are implicitly encouraging — a broken windows problem. If this goes on for long enough, we’re no longer a community of programmers who ask and answer programming questions, we’re a community of random people discussing.. whatever. That’s toxic.
• If enough of these closed questions are allowed to hang around, they become clutter that reduces the overall signal to noise ratio — which further reduces confidence in the system.

The point of deleting questions is in fine to make the Internet a better place. Closed questions (throughout this post, this does not include duplicates) are questions that have been considered unwelcome here. Off-topic questions are questions we do not have the expertise to answer; our answers have not been reviewed by competent people, so their validity is put into question. Non-constructive or “not real” questions are questions that cannot reasonably be answered; answers to such questions are usually partial and often miselading. Too localized questions do not add value due to highly limited interest.

Responding to your arguments:

• Reputation points are not a consideration when taking moderation actions (whether acting as a user with reputation-granted privileges, or as a diamond moderator). The purpose of moderation is to clean up the site.
• Closed questions are still found in searches. They have exactly the same visibility as open questions.
• I have never seen it useful to have a record of rejected questions.
• When a borderline question is asked, it is best if there is no closed, non-deleted similar question already on the site. This lets the new question be evaluated on its own merits, rather than being summarily lumped with the old question and pressured into sharing its fate.

I do not see why Computer Science should have a different policy from other sites.

Closed questions are not deleted while there is still debate as to whether they should be reopened. After two weeks, I did not see any hint of a debate as to whether Why does Knuth persist with MIX/MMIX? might be reopened. If you think this question can be improved and reopened, answer here or flag it and a moderator will undelete it.