First, let me apologize to some that I fear will read the rest of this node with the wrong tone. This is one of those items that I can easily see someone reading and getting an impression that I'm angry and overly sarcastic. Well, sure, I am being sarcastic (I'm almost always a bit sarcastic), but some will probably read more sarcasm than I intended. The fact is that it is late, I'm tired. If I wait until I have more time in order to word this more carefully, well, it would likely never get posted at all. And tomorrow I may think that would have been a better choice. But I hope not. I wrote it with a smile in my heart and the "Thanks" was sincere. Really. No, it was. Okay, I'm off to bed. :)

My standard response to that is, how much are you going to reap? 1%? 5%? So searching through 95 nodes is going be a lot nicer than searching through 100?

And not deleting nodes about roof repairs somehow makes it harder to find nodes about CGI security? Sure, occasionally you'll find some overlap and save someone searching for "frame" from finding nodes about hanging art (sorry, I found no realistic examples handy, but I hope you see my point anyway). But mostly I don't think reaping off topic items will help searching much. So even if you reap 20% of the site content, the fact that off topic items often don't overlap with "on topic" items means you only cut the rummaging from 100 matches to maybe 90 matches. No, I don't think most people would even notice.

Also, nobody is forced to vote on consideration...

Heck, noone is forced to visit this site. So who cares? (: I don't really know what else to say to that "argument".

Perl Monks isn't really a great archive for ad-hoc searching for fantastic answers to Perl questions. I don't see how it will ever be. Sure, there is quite a bit of good stuff here related to Perl. But the long-term benefit will come from distilling it a huge amount (throwing away 99.9%), not from reaping a bit here and there. And distilling the master copy would suck in my opinion. Distill bits out into Perl FAQs and tutorials, etc.

Thanks for mentioning this. I'd nearly forgotten that I'd previously run into a lot of people who wanted to purge stuff of lesser quality for the good of the archive. Probably because I still don't see how that idea holds water.

Yes, I think there is some stuff that is worthy of purging, and even more stuff that is worthy of deemphasizing (such that it is somewhat hidden, less likely to appear to the casual viewer). But I don't think any of that will have other than a trivial impact to how easy searching is in the future.