Feedback from an established user on MESE: "I offer this in the spirit of ‘we are at <1 question per day, let’s save what we can’'

Question

I responded, critically but also respectfully, to an established user's comment below a rather ill-formed question. He responded: "I offer this in the spirit of ‘we are at <1 question per day, let’s save what we can'".

This concerned me, because I'd love to see MESE graduate from beta status, but not at the cost of keeping low-quality posts, or keeping questions that are clearly off-topic for this site, just in order to make it "look like" we receive more on-topic, quality questions than we actually do. The user I speak of who posted the comment quoted in the title, has since deleted that comment.

I support this site, no matter what. But I'd like us to graduate in a more dignified manner, i.e., not keeping every single question that comes in, et.al, not keeping off-topic and low-quality questions, just to graduate from beta.

I'd like to hear other perspectives, because many users have been here far longer than I. Am I missing something I don't yet grasp? I do understand that quality control might be a more relevant issue when a site is receiving an abundant number of poor quality and/or off-topic questions. I'd merely advocate that the "worst of the worst" in terms of quality, and all off-topic questions, not be given a bye, just to increase the count of (legitimate) questions received on this site. Are there arguments I haven't considered?

Another alternative I am perfectly supportive of, is that users who believe a question, though admittedly poorly asked, is worth keeping, to make the effort to edit and improve such questions that they support keeping, and make only edits that do not make already existent answers irrelevant. How do others feel about this?

EDIT:

The latest example, after my post yesterday, are the three upvotes for this question which fails to address math educators or math education, even after being immediately informed that this might be a good idea for the OP to do.

Please, let's show some self-respect as a valid SE site candidate, by not sniveling and groveling to keep off-topic questions here, solely for the "added question" it might add to the tally of daily MESE posts. Let's stick with counting valid MESE posts.

Answer 1

For context, the question was What's the point of exercises without answers?

I saw the question, along with the close votes it was gathering. A member both commented, pointing out the underlying reason the question was being voted to close, i.e. that it read more like a rhetorical question, or a rant. Fair enough, time to close. But, then the same member posted a +7 answer, which I voted up. It seemed to me, there was a choice, to let it get closed or to save the question by editing out the offending bits to save the essence of what the 'good' answer addressed.

What I found curious was the seeming contradiction of the effort to write a good answer while at the same time seeing a rejection to my suggestion that an edit might save the question.

"We are getting fewer than one question per day" is certainly not a claim that bad questions remain, but rather, an effort to see if there's a kernel of good question that can remain or be expanded given an edit. For example, a question that is bound to be closed as 'opinion-based' may very well be morphed into one which asks if there is a study or research that addresses the matter. 'Too Broad' might just take a bit of effort to narrow the scope of the question. Of course, as with any edits, the edited version should still reflect the intent of the OP, if not, the edit can be rejected.

My intention, here, is spelled out in the last line of this current question -

Another alternative I am perfectly supportive of, is that users who believe a question, though admittedly poorly asked, is worth keeping, to make the effort to edit and improve such questions that they support keeping, and make only edits that do not make already existent answers irrelevant.

And this is exactly what I had in mind when I offered (now-deleted) comments.

Last - For what it's worth, we are trying this at Money.SE. Clearly off-topic questions still addressed as usual, but members willing to edit questions where such edits are considered minor and on reflection, leave the question as a valuable one. No lowering of standards, no impact to on-topic list. Just an observation that an OP isn't always going to do so.

Edit - the attempt at "rescuing questions" was recently acknowledged at the Apple stack at the post Shout out to people for rescuing questions. And the 'lifeboat' badge seems to encourage this approach.

Answer 2

Although I mostly agree with JoeTaxpayer's answer, my response to the original post, the heart of which is

I'd like to hear other perspectives

is probably a little long for a comment.

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I like the sentiment of the following paragraph:

Another alternative I am perfectly supportive of, is that users who believe a question, though admittedly poorly asked, is worth keeping, to make the effort to edit and improve such questions that they support keeping, and make only edits that do not make already existent answers irrelevant.

However, I think that it is sometimes difficult to edit a question gently, and so I prefer to sometimes answer the question which I think is implicit in a "question" - really, a post. After all, a post which is a cri de coeur, and perhaps not 'properly' formulated for the nominal specs of this site, usually has a pretty good question about teaching embedded in it - but turning it into an antiseptic question may defeat that purpose, not to mention sometimes make it harder to find in a search.

So I propose the following, which I have done from time to time:

When there is a legitimate pedagogical issue lurking within a question that could benefit from personal experiences or from research content, let's keep the original question as part of the post, making clear by whitespace what the implied question is.

This makes it much clearer who is responsible for each part. I know that, in principle, one can look through the edits - but given that some edits on the SE network are for the most trivial things, while other newbies to SE might not even know what the edits are for, I doubt that a lot of people are going to be digging through those too much unless they are already pretty invested and know how to ask 'good' questions.

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Final comment: This view is based on many experiences editing in both math and math ed (or at least SOTL) publications. MESE is not a high-level journal that needs to edit out all but the highest-quality content; it is a place for people to ask questions about something we all care about. And so, like in many editorial situations, we should work with an author if there is a good kernel of an idea. Since the nature of the Q&A format is that one can't guarantee the author has immediate internet access to see the comments or suggestions, we can try to do it ourselves in a way that maximally preserves authorial intent visibly.

The worst thing that happens is that there is a confusing question that nobody looks at. So, that costs Stackoverflow how many microdollars per year to keep in their database? But the benefit of keeping both that kernel (editing) and keeping the real style and heart of the post (leaving the original alone, using markup to put the 'actual' question front and center) can be incalculable.

Not least for a new user who instead of feeling like MESE is yet another edit-policing Wikipedia, is a place to soon become a full contributor.