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When a closed question has zero redeeming value and bad content, is it encouraged that high-rep users vote to delete it?

As an example: " world with words of power " (which Gorchestopher H correctly identified as 100% dupe).

If so, is there a way to promote that? (I mean in the sense of promoting the knowledge among high rep users that they CAN do so and should).

The reason I ask is that I can see pretty reliably that high rep users vote to close bad questions; but very rarely see anyone but me vote to delete them (based on my always being delete vote #1 - I admit to not ever monitoring "delete votes" moderator tool queue so I could be wrong).

Just to be clear, this question is under assumption that the question is unambiguously and unquestionably bad; can not and should not be fixed, and contains zero useful information in either question or the answers (meaning no need to ask moderators to merge). It is NOT intended as grounds to discuss which questions are worth deleting vs. not.

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  • Just to point out, I thought that the policy on duplicate questions specifically was to leave closed, but not to delete as they provide users help when searching for answers.
    – NominSim
    Nov 28, 2012 at 21:28
  • @NominSim - Not quite. They can be beneficial if they use different wording (to increase search hits from different worded questions). They aren't beneficial if that is not the reason for duplicateness.
    – DVK-on-Ahch-To
    Nov 28, 2012 at 21:59
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    Duplicates almost always use different wording though, which is the point I was trying to make. Of course it doesn't help if the wording is exactly the same, but that rarely occurs (as the site itself shows a user when they type a question that is exactly the same).
    – NominSim
    Nov 28, 2012 at 22:20

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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I don't think anything needs to be done. IIRC, you're notified when you earn new privileges on a SE site. And the page for this privilege states pretty thoroughly when people should vote to delete. It also touches on the tools that let 10k+ users know when someone's placed a delete vote.

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  • Is there any easy way for me to find out how widely the delete votes are used by non-moderators? (I'm guessing Data Explorer if anything?) As I said, i suspect that people don't use that privilege on SFF widely enough, but it's pretty weak basis of suspicion (I never see questions with 1 or 2 existing delete votes)
    – DVK-on-Ahch-To
    Aug 27, 2012 at 18:37
  • @DVK Not that I know of. Data Explorer would just get you total delete votes. I know the system auto-deletes things too, the DE count could possibly include those too.
    – user1027
    Aug 27, 2012 at 18:40
  • could you please elaborate on " the system auto-deletes things too"? I haven't heard of that before.
    – DVK-on-Ahch-To
    Aug 27, 2012 at 19:33
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    @DVK The second google result sums it up nicely: there is an auto delete process in place that is taking care of old abandoned / dead questions and removing them
    – user1027
    Aug 27, 2012 at 19:39

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