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Deleted questions can't be reviewed by others without sufficient reputation.

J.S. Mill wrote better than I can, in On Liberty:

the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it.

[...]

  First, if any opinion is compelled to silence, that opinion may, for aught we can certainly know, be true. To deny this is to assume our own infallibility.
  Secondly, though the silenced opinion be an error, it may, and very commonly does, contain a portion of truth; and since the general or prevailing opinion on any subject is rarely or never the whole truth, it is only by the collision of adverse opinions that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied.
  Thirdly, even if the received opinion be not only true, but the whole truth; unless it is suffered to be, and actually is, vigorously and earnestly contested, it will, by most of those who receive it, be held in the manner of a prejudice, with little comprehension or feeling of its rational grounds. And not only this, but, fourthly, the meaning of the doctrine itself will be in danger of being lost, or enfeebled, and deprived of its vital effect on the character and conduct: the dogma becoming a mere formal profession, inefficacious for good, but cumbering the ground, and preventing the growth of any real and heartfelt conviction, from reason or personal experience.

This is germane to the embolded sentence.

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  • 2
    The analogy fails as closure and deletion aren't permanent: the OP can always edit to improve and flag for reopening / undeletion.
    – Em C
    May 14, 2018 at 16:37
  • 10
    Closing a question isn't punishment; it means that something's wrong with the question and needs to be fixed. I think you're treating closure like prison. Think of it more like rehabilitation.
    – HDE 226868
    May 14, 2018 at 16:42
  • 13
    You have consistently failed to improve your questions. You can not say that we haven't given you ample advice and guidance on how to do so. Can you please explain why you feel you should be exempt from the rules here?
    – Catija
    May 14, 2018 at 16:43
  • @Catija "You have consistently failed to improve your questions." Please elaborate.
    – user2423
    May 14, 2018 at 17:01
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    I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it doesn't seek input or discussion.
    – apaul
    May 14, 2018 at 17:01
  • @EmC But deleted questions can't be tracked by others without sufficient reputation.
    – user2423
    May 14, 2018 at 17:01
  • If you notice a post was deleted and want to know what happened, you can make a meta post or ask in chat. Also I am pretty sure when posts get undeleted they will bump to the homepage like an edit.
    – Em C
    May 14, 2018 at 17:12
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    Why do you think it is important for lower-rep users to see deleted content? Doesn't that negate the purpose of actually deleting instead of just downvoting / closing? Deleted posts are deleted for a reason..
    – Em C
    May 14, 2018 at 17:14
  • @EmC Post deletion doesn't feel easy to track.
    – user2423
    May 14, 2018 at 18:31
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    I think that's intentional, see meta.stackexchange.com/a/209707/347147 .. and a bunch of other requests on main meta, probably starting here: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2645 Seems like right now the only reliable notification on deleted posts is if a mod leaves a comment after it is deleted.
    – Em C
    May 14, 2018 at 18:50

1 Answer 1

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Nope.

In criminal law, the suffering imposed upon the guilty deprives them of something irreplaceable - their life, their health, their position in society... The cost is so great as to outweigh the benefits of punishing a greater number of offenders, or so the argument goes.

The cost of removing a question from this site is... The time spent asking or answering it. And the quicker it is closed, the less time is wasted answering. There's no punitive aspect to this; the asker can immediately start writing a new question, or make edits to their existing question.

Indeed, the cost of allowing a problematic question to remain on the site is potentially much, much higher than that of removing 10x benign questions, assuming all removals are performed quickly: a benign question can be restored and answered with relatively little effort, while a problematic question stands to waste many hours of time from answerers and readers who struggle to make sense of it.

This is particularly true here, as we expect answerers to invest a considerable effort into researching and supporting their answers; when a question changes significantly and invalidates prior answers, this all goes to waste, and discourages answerers from investing so much care into their future efforts.

Also... We're not here to refine some unknown Truth by violently smashing together opinions. This is a site for solutions; if there is no truth to be had for a given question, then ideally nothing should be written at all.

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  • Thanks. I've removed the analogy to criminal law; Mill's writing ought suffice.
    – user2423
    May 14, 2018 at 17:04
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    Meaning you just invalidated the bulk of my answer. It would have been better for me if I had just closed this question...
    – Shog9
    May 14, 2018 at 17:06
  • Please feel free to say that I changed my answer in your answer. I'll happily reply to any updates. I changed nothing on Mill in my quote. So I don't think that I invalidated any part of your answer, if it also accounted for Mill?
    – user2423
    May 14, 2018 at 18:28
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    You wrote nothing in either revision to explain why your Mill quote is at all relevant to what we do here on IPS. I addressed it briefly in my final paragraph.
    – Shog9
    May 14, 2018 at 20:47