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These two Questions What Application Indicators are available?, and What kinds of desktop environments and shells are available? Do they need to be closed? Even though they are popular and What Application Indicators are available? has 487 upvotes by the time that I wrote this, and 422 favourites.

But according to this answer Highly upvoted old questions would be closed immediately if asked today., it doesn't matter, how old they are, how popular they are because it doesn’t protect them agasit it... So do you think they need to be close for being to broad, if they are?

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I don't agree with the system-purist approach here.

The questions aren't causing problems for us. They pull in serious amounts of traffic. I get that closing them probably wouldn't change that immediately but again, this is hand-wringing and work over something that only brings us a ton of people.

Infinite lists aren't great (as we state in these questions) but there's nothing to suggest that all new answers are only bad things. If we're going to keep them alive at all (which I consider in our wider interest) we might as well let people add and improve things.

There is also the argument that if we close, 10ks can delete. Then nobody benefits from the years of work that went into these things.

In short, we could do a number of things but I can't see how any of them improve the site.

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To counter Oli argument, and propose a perfect solution, I say to migrate all the information to the Tag wiki's and delete the questions on the site.

This seems to be the solution that other sites that had questions that where causing problems (namely the broken window problem) which ended being closed and deleted, where the information was migrated. Luckily almost all those list questions has a tag in the site (backup, indicators, browsers, download-manager, desktop-environments, etc.), which would end improving the site.

The community behind those tags now maintain the information in a single place. This has several advantages, which I mentioned, with the only downside that it's more difficult for low rep users to add information (I think it rise the restriction to 500 rep, but I can't find references in the privileges page), through there was also the 100 rep restriction for CW'ed posts anyways.

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  • I'm not voting either way on this but the first answer on MSE has some valid concerns.
    – Oli Mod
    Commented Apr 24, 2014 at 16:40
  • Like even yourself said, who reads tag wikis? I don't think they are searchable either (at least not easily).
    – Seth Mod
    Commented Apr 24, 2014 at 22:20
  • @Seth maybe because there's nothing interesting to read there? People don't read, because nobody teach them. No the other way around.
    – Braiam
    Commented Apr 24, 2014 at 22:25
  • @Seth just to make you jelly, this is Debian tag wiki on UL. Don't you think that such tag wiki is attractive to users?
    – Braiam
    Commented Apr 24, 2014 at 22:44
  • Indeed, but I don't see you turning any of the above mentioned questions into a tag wiki.
    – Seth Mod
    Commented Apr 24, 2014 at 22:47
  • @Seth well, apparently 2 users doesn't agree with this. I was proposing an idea I had, not actually executing it.
    – Braiam
    Commented Apr 24, 2014 at 22:53
  • +1 for the wiki idea, but I would also leave them (closed) on the main site. They are actually likelier to be read there, they seem like good candidates for the "Post is kept for historical reasons but is a bad fit for the site" message.
    – terdon
    Commented Apr 25, 2014 at 23:34
  • After some clarification, I think improving the tag wiki is a good idea, but I cannot support deleting them from the site.
    – Seth Mod
    Commented Apr 25, 2014 at 23:52

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