Wow, some of these questions actually seem pretty reasonable - like this one: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9033/hidden-features-of-c
Any ideas why they were closed so early?
Any ideas why they were closed so early?
The guidelines that lead to this are quite reasonable, but as with anything as complex as deciding fitness for inclusion there will be corner cases. A moderator not intimately familiar with the topic, or a moderator who is in "cleanup mode" may end up deleting/closing something that actually would serve the community but technically violates the guidelines.
Far too often on S.O. I'd see a question and excitedly click on it, only to find it had been closed on some technicality. I understand (and appreciate!) the desire for S.O. to keep a tight focus on objective information, but sometimes I think the mods are too strict.
This is a human/community problem, and has no trivial solution. We should also remember that these issues do not mean that a large number of closed/deleted items are erroneous. In fact, both wikipedia and S.O. people do a pretty good job overall. We can and should point out the failures and try to make the system better, but it doesn't mean the system is hugely broken.
The main reason this was closed is because determining what or what does not constitute a hidden feature is highly subjective. Depending on the audience, some features that are considered common knowledge could be considered hidden features. We generally want to focus on the domain of questions that have solid, objective answers, or rather, that solve a clear problem that people have, whereas this question is more focused on trivia.
Furthermore, "List of <X>" questions, as we dub them, generally aren't well-suited for the Stack Exchange format, especially when the question is as popular as this one. Note that navigating the list without OP's quick-link breakdown is a pain because of the way that each individual's answer is separated.
I'm sure there's some personally type that experiences a deep need to organize and delete (and it's probably over-represented in the SO community), but that's all this is. I find it highly unlikely that deleting these posts is having any effect on the quality of new questions asked.
Also, this particular post is locked, not deleted. Google will still find it.
Let the search engines figure that out! It's their job!
Is there any evidence whatsoever that deleting/closing questions like these make SO a better place and improves the rate with which people can find answers through search engines?
I suspect there's none.
Ummm... right. You go ahead and keep posting noise to your site and let the search engines figure it out. Let us know how that works.
That's very nice, except much of the discussion here indicates clearly that deleted posts are not noise but are useful, valuable resources to the participants. So the "must reduce noise" explanation doesn't work here.
Neither do you. I'm the moderator who undeleted and locked that question so it can't be deleted again (after ten community members voted to delete it). I've argued in the past in their favor, but the community (not moderators alone) decided that this type of question isn't a good fit and we don't want to encourage more of them by keeping the old ones open.
Here's the old discussion about these questions where I defended them: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/56669/should-hidden-...
As for them not being a good fit for the software, frankly they're not. Just look at the "Hidden Features of C#" question. There are over 300 answers. Many duplicates had to be deleted because no one is going to take the time to read them all to see if their answer was already posted. This isn't really the kind of thing we (again, the community, not just moderators) want on Stack Overflow. We want to focus more on questions that have one objectively best answer.
My general claim is merely that the closing of these questions is not implacably imposed by the software, but is instead a community choice.
I don't think we disagree on this being a 'religious' issue. I am clearly an SO apostate.
So, SO say it doesn't fit on their website (fair enough, their server, their rules) but it's a great question for someone, and there doesn't appear to be anywhere to ask it. (Maybe HN??).