I know how everyone can be happy!

Question

Unicorns for everybody!

.... not really.

I'm talking about our long trail of "list of X" that predate the site since immemorial times. As you can see in previous discussions people doesn't want them deleted, but being closed do not prevent deletion, locked prevents deletion but also prevent from updating, and closed prevent new additions. Well, I have the perfect solution, but first, how I got the idea.

While reading the related discussion in the tags, I came upon this question which was asking exactly what to do with the "list of X" and "what X are available", Jeff said (paraphrasing): well, this is tricky, there are valid "lists" that aren't too broad (too broad in this context that there are enough to fill a book about them). Well, there wasn't exactly too much consensus at the time but it catch up my attention the SO example that were based the discussion about one of the ideas (locking). From here on my proposal.

They deleted effectively all answers, no questions asked, and moved everything to a GitHub repository. The list is about freely available books about programing (they really have many, I recommend you to read some). If you check the "stars" that the repository has is over 25k, the amount of users contributing in the number of 309, is actively maintained (last commit 9 hours ago and active contributions in the timeline), anyone can contribute, it has a nice index (!), over 4,700 forks, +2k watchers that gets alerted for each new contribution, etc.

This is a win-win situation. People will find the list as they want to, we still get the traffic, a grumpy user will stop complaining, anyone can contribute to the list, it allows markdown. Did I forget something?

Answer 1

It's hard to talk about "what users want" when none of the cited past discussions seem to end in agreement. The "accepted" answer on this question is not the popular favourite... By a very long way.

It appears to be a battle between:

• A small, tight band of Deletionists. People who would uphold every single founding rule of SE, regardless of the community's view, with tools that allow them to edit, delete and track nearly-deleted posts.
• Preservationalists who manually have to check what's being destroyed, who can't counter-vote until it's frankly too late, and when they do find something, they need to find other people who feel the same. The "recently deleted" list is usually full of moderator deletions so no, that doesn't help them.
• People who would rather be answering things but constantly get sucked into meta squabbles about why we should be deleting something or tagging something sideways this week.

The fight isn't fair. It's much easier to delete something you want to delete than it is keep it alive... And I think that's a real shame given the effort that has gone into some of these posts.

What you're suggesting is:

• A load of work.
• Harder to maintain.
• Doesn't rank at all (the point of SE)
• Detrimental to the site metrics... Lots of views equals lots of new users. We're nothing without new blood.
• Is rather consistently against the popular point of view.

More than anything, these just aren't a problem.

People constantly cite them as broken windows but I see no evidence of that.

These aren't our problem at all. Not processing a high enough proportion of new questions is our sticking point. These aren't contributing to that at all.

Yet we seem destined to spend at least another five eternities debating whether or not something valuable to the site (at least on utilitarian metrics) should be deleted or not.
Why can't we just leave Britney alone and answer something?

Answer 2

This is a much more reasonable solution than simply deleting them, true. However, there are still quite a few problems with it:

1. You are still moving this content off-site which is part of why we don't want to delete them in the first place.

2. Many users will be scared off by github. This is AU not SO. This means that your stated goal of allowing edits to continue will likely fail.

3. The answers will no longer be indexed by google so they will stop bringing in views which is one of the main reasons we want those crappy questions to remain.

4. Why in the world would anyone want to go to such a huge effort as setting up a whole github repository when the questions and their answers are already here on the site? Again, we're not SO, we're orders of magnitude smaller.

5. I am still not convinced that there is a real problem here. The only argument against keeping these questions I can think of is that they might (I said might) give new users the impression that such questions are on topic. I don't see evidence of this. While we are indeed flooded by a metric crapton of bad questions, I don't recall seeing any that asked for a list in the past few months. I really doubt that these questions are causing us any problems. They're closed for Pete's sake!

Which brings me to my preferred "solution" for this "problem". Simply close them and add a message to each of these questions under discussion that reads:

This question is present as a matter of historical interest. While you are encouraged to help maintain its answers, please understand that "big list" questions are not generally allowed on Ask Ubuntu and will be closed per the FAQ.

This has already been done for the IDE and media player questions. Let's do it for the rest as well. This approach has the following benefits:

1. It lets us keep the questions, and the traffic they bring, while making it very clear that such questions are not wanted.

2. The existing answers can still be improved but no new answers can be posted.

3. It does not require the (extensive) extra work of setting up an external repository for them.

4. We don't send users off to a different website to find the information they are looking for.

In combination, the above seem to address all of the issues you have with this type of question, we get to keep them and new users won't use them as an excuse to post similar ones.