I wanted to share this few days back but for some reason I was hoping that it would get fixed but no, its getting bit worse. As I see, site is progressing really well, but with a low quality issue.
Am happy that new users are taking interest in the site and sharing their knowledge by asking questions and answering. But, most of these new users are new to StackExchange or are not aware of the rules of how StackExchange works or what does this site expect from them.
How Hinduism.SE Started?
Hinduism.SE was proposed by one of our fellow user on Area51 and 2 months back, StackExchange started a public beta so that users around the world who are professionals and enthusiast can participate and share their knowledge.
What are we looking for or say what we are expecting from users on the site?
We want the users to share their knowledge to the site. Be it an enthusiast or a professional. If you are new to Hinduism, read the other questions and learn, take advantage of that, if you don't find one, ask a question and wait for a professional to answer. If you are a professional, help users by answering their questions with detailed answers.
Focus on Quality and not Quantity
Whats important is quality of the content we are sharing here. Quality in terms of knowledge, uniqueness, usefulness. It will make sense to ask 10 useful quality questions and several quality answers rather than asking 100 low quality questions which later attracts 100's of low quality answers on them which won't be useful anyways.
The site is in beta stage, what we are looking for is a solid database of nice questions which will be useful to others who search on the internet as well as the inhouse users. Inorder to graduate, we should maintain the quality of the content which is shared here. The quality of the site will never get better if users keep on posting two line answers, or copy paste answers on the site.
So why this question suddenly?
Since few days, am seeing that many of the users are registering with the site which is good and we welcome you all, from which few are complaining for the actions taken by moderators or high reputation users on their posts such as editing, deleting etc.
Mostly these users are new to StackExchange network and probably they never visited the help section of the site which will explain them everything about the site. So if you are one of them, please read the help section.
https://hinduism.stackexchange.com/help
Why certain actions are taken by moderators straight away
The site is young, around 60 days old and we already got hundreds of post on our site. Inorder to maintain the quality, moderators will...
- Close questions (off-topic, unclear, low quality)
- Delete comments (will keep important ones or useful discussion ones)
- Delete answers (low quality, comment like answer, not an answer, vandalized)
- Edit your questions / answers (most of the time users post huge chunk of text so we will break them into different paragraphs, edit tags, correct grammar, correct spelling errors and so on....)
- Lock posts
- Protect posts
Why should moderators take such actions and not the community?
One answer - Lack of user participation and use of their privileges. As I see, there are currently 2 users with reputation of 3000+ and I would like to say that they are helping to a great extent in keeping the site clean by using their privileges and so does the other active users BUT...
That's not sufficient. These users cannot directly close questions single handed or delete wrong answers right away. They need to cast votes and yes, there should be a peer decision for some post where moderators don't take any action.
But if you see, 2 users as of now is not sufficient enough to carry out all the activities on the site so here a moderator comes into action. When community elects the moderators they trust the moderators decision and hence when a moderator takes any action, he does something good for the site. Well, sometimes moderators do some mistakes but after all, we all do mistakes.
Moderators cannot wait for the community to take actions every time. An off-topic question will generate low quality answers if not closed on time which further degrades the quality of the site. Same is with the answer, we cannot wait every time a user posts the comment as an answer.
So what now? (IMPORTANT)
As I said before, moderators cannot wait for the users to decide on certain scenarios so they will take necessary actions where it is required. Actions which will be taken by moderator immediately for coming few months :-
- Comments will be deleted in a day or two after the discussion is over and is not useful anymore, i.e temporary in nature
- Questions will be closed if they are way off-topic, unclear, low quality, duplicate
- Answers will be deleted if a user copied the content from a website and didn't provided a link for the same to credit, or if a user answers comment like answer, which may be converted into a comment or may be deleted, low quality/wrong, opinion based, out of scope answering(such as science answer)
- Posts will be locked if user gets on a rollback war
- Posts will be protected if the question is getting too many low quality answers
Note: Moderators left comments on the answer before deleting them and used to give some days to the user to edit, but now the answers will be deleted instantly and surely the moderator will leave a comment explaining why he deleted and won't undelete the post unless the post is edited and considered appropriate.
In all the above scenarios, moderator will try to comment always and take necessary action, hence user can always flag the moderator for undelete if they edit their posts appropriately.
Ummm, just a note
Please don't feel that the rules are harsh or the moderation is too strict, think in a positive way that we are keeping the site clean. If you want the site to succeed its not just on us, its on the community.
Hence, don't complain if your posts gets closed or deleted, moderators do it for a reason. Still if you think that the action taken on your post was inappropriate, feel free to discuss on meta.
Related posts
