5

We have fairly stringent community standards on the main site and a lot of nonsense claims and speculations get deleted.

The Meta site has less stringent rules and is open to opinion, so we can discuss those standards.

At least one user has developed an ingenious work-around, using this lowered set of standards as a loop-hole to allow their rejected, poor-quality answers to be published in full - i.e. to ask on Meta why their answer was deleted, and include the entire answer.

In these cases, the goal is not to resolve some question about scope nor to challenge the standards we use. It is apparently merely to vanity-publish their opinions in a place where they are not welcome.

How should such such meta-questions be dealt with?

1
  • Just so we're clear: I'm not so interested in the current case. I'm looking ahead to when the next person tries it. I'm hoping by then I can point back to whatever people decide here to justify my (compliant) actions as having community support - as opposed to being seen as a single-user on an unjustified censorship campaign.
    – Oddthinking Mod
    Nov 29, 2012 at 5:09

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
7

While it is important that Meta remain open to legitimate discussion, this technique is circumventing the goal of cleaning up "broken window" answers.

In a court of law, you don't get to air all of your grievances against your neighbour - they require you to remain on topic to the case at hand. Similar rules should apply here.

The questions should be edited down to include only enough of the original answer to clarify the points of the meta-question.

A link to the deleted answer is acceptable to provide evidence of the claims made in the question, even though this is not visible to the general public.

1
  • Odd, drop me an email if you want more info on this. I think I know exactly what you are talking about.
    – Larian LeQuella
    Nov 29, 2012 at 3:03
3

A link suffices to enable discussion on meta.

  • Users with undeletion powers are able to see the deleted answers.

  • Users that do not have the reputation to undelete an answer, can't, but also can't do anything about the deletion either!

I don't want to take a position on whether this is fair or not, however, this case should be taken to SEI so it lowers the rep necessary for undeletion. Until then, deleted answers are made invisible on purpose by the software.

Such policy can clearly be discussed on Meta.SO, but it should not be circumvented by copy and paste (here on Skeptics Meta or in another answer to the same question).

If an answer is copied and pasted (or otherwise republished) after deletion, it should be edited out or deleted immediately.

3
  • 2
    "Users that do not have the reputation to undelete an answer, can't, but also can't do anything about the deletion either!" - and such users shouldn't be able to form and express their own opinion about whether the post should have been deleted?
    – Andrew Grimm
    Dec 1, 2012 at 8:11
  • @AndrewGrimm according to SEI and the code this site runs on, no. That's why they can't see them. As I said, I don't necessarily agree - however it's a separate issue.
    – Sklivvz
    Dec 1, 2012 at 10:26
  • @Sklivvz I think that you misunderstood the difference between discussing something and acting upon it.
    – T. Sar
    Mar 18, 2015 at 11:33

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .