http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=44057

At the moment, the Q&A section seems to allow anyone to post a question. Answers to these questions are looked over by some shady high level character (I'm guessing they live in a smoke filled, wood paneled room, but I might be wrong there), before being accepted for display.

It's my understanding that the Q&A section should be a repository of good, well defined questions to which the answers should be general and useful. An extened version of the FAQ if you will. At the moment some badly defined, misplaced or just plain silly questions are appearing (eg. this misleading title). If the Q&A section gets filled up with bad questions it will end up being of no use to anyone.

My suggestion is that both answers and questions are approved by an editor before being displayed (possibly making an exception for Newest Nodes). What do people think?

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
(tye)Re: Q & A, should it all be moderated?
by tye (Sage) on Nov 30, 2000 at 05:08 UTC

    If so, then we also need more Q&A Editors. In a related situation, I'm surprised how long many new root nodes linger not being approved (and with lots of replies, many of which are from monks high enough to approve new questions). So if the sum total of Level 7 and above monks isn't enough to keep up with new root nodes, how can we expect the current cast of Q&A Editors to keep up with not just new categorized questions but all of the new answers as well.

    I'd actually prefer that new questions be moderated (and that for monks below level 3, attempts to post new categorized questions just get redirected to SoPW) but that new answers show up immediately with the old system of voting determining the order in which answers are listed and Q&A Editors being allowed to eventually drop truely bad answers.

    I think the old interaction of answering, reading answers, prompting better answers, voting, etc. worked pretty good for generating good answers. The current situation just generates a lot of answers that no one sees so the 9th answerer didn't learn much from the previous 8 answerers because of the dificulty in finding all of the unapproved answers to read. Plus, being a Q&A Editor doesn't mean that you know all of the answers. So the collection of voting monks is better at rating answers than just the Q&A Editors would be.

            - tye (but my friends call me "Tye")
      Agreed on all accounts except the number of upper level monks. I may be breaking the curve, but I have never tried to show the nodelet I would need to try to approve root nodes. If I am not breaking the curve then it needn't be so much that there aren't enough high-level monks as the fact that there are not enough spending time approving things...

        I guess I didn't make my point well since what you said was pretty much my point. There are quite a few high-level monks and it appears that very few spend much time approving posts. There aren't nearly as many Q&A Editors and I'm not certain that the time-spent-approving/monk ratio is hugely higher for that group (and I'm not accusing Q&A Editors of slacking -- but I don't want the job of Q&A Editor to be a big burden).

                - tye (but my friends call me "Tye")
Re: Q & A, should it all be moderated?
by Adam (Vicar) on Nov 30, 2000 at 05:16 UTC
Re: Q & A (An Editor's ideas)
by Russ (Deacon) on Dec 01, 2000 at 10:12 UTC
    See Categorized Q&A Suggestion for one of my earlier suggestions (focuses more on XP gains and losses, but...)

    As a Q&A Editor (for some time, quite active, but recently too swamped to devote lots of time to it), let me make this observation. Editing Categorized Questions and Answers is pretty difficult.

    • When a user posts a bad title, but I/we don't find it until there have been answers, it is quite tedious to correct the title. We have to go into each response and edit each title to make them all match.
    • There has been an increasingly increasingly large number of posts to Q&A (the increase has been increasing ;-). This displays the success of PM, but it makes it harder to stay on top of the questions and screen them for content. It is pretty easy to miss a question or three.
    • It is difficult to "move" a post from Q&A to SoPW. You have seen how I handle that, I'm sure. It takes two browser windows, quite a bit of cut-and-paste, and some status bar perusing to get links to work to and from the new node.
    I would like to see:
    • New questions remain in a "New Questions" area, unassigned to a category until an editor assigns them. This prevents a flood of questions from escaping our notice. (Currently, we can see the last ten questions posted. If there are more than ten un-moderated questions, the excess will go completely unedited.)
    • Allow Editors to change a Question Title, and have that new title 'cascade' to all answers. The titles are the single-most important part of a question, because that is how users search for answers. It should be easier to maintain those titles.
    • Allow a Question to move to SoPW, taking all answers with it. I understand from earlier, offline discussions with vroom that Q&A nodes exist in a different format than SoPW nodes. It will not be easy to move Q&A nodes. However, I know that I have tried to 'delay' the editing of a misplaced question, because it has already received answers. I didn't want to delete the answers because they were helpful, but I couldn't move the question and take the answers with it. So, I move it to "Unassigned" to come back to it later.
    • A willingness to add/modify categories. Some of the categories are just too broad (see CGI for example).

    Russ
    Brainbench 'Most Valuable Professional' for Perl