This is based on a question in Writing about revitalising the community and is pretty much a blatant copy-paste of Monica's answer there.

Essentially, it's been suggested that we remove all mass-imported content, so we want to look at the feasibility of doing so here and to see if that's what people actually want.

Straight copies of content from Somewhere Else are almost certainly hurting and, in volume, can give a negative impression - we look like a copy of another site, and the new content here gets lost in that. On the other hand, some people have improved imported content, and we wouldn't want to throw that out.

I propose that we delete imported content that hasn't been touched here. Specifically:

• Posts that were imported, not claimed, and not edited: delete. For a question, these properties need to apply to the answers too.

• Posts that were imported, claimed, and not edited: compile a list, give authors time to improve if they want, and otherwise delete. (We can ask authors to go ahead and delete things they don't think are valuable enough to keep here.)

• Posts that were imported, claimed, not edited, but have at least 5 upvotes (I don't know if we have any of these): the votes indicate that the community found value in them, so compile a list for public review.

This review should leave us with a higher concentration of local, valuable content, and many fewer backlinks. After the dust settles, we can evaluate what remains in a second pass. And remember, anybody is welcome to re-ask and self-answer questions here -- just make sure you don't cut corners in the question. Alternatively, we could add articles in some form to our community if people prefer that approach -- resources, wiki, blog, or something else. These are all ideas that are being explored on some other Codidact communities.

The first step in this process is to calculate the numbers of posts which this would effect, then if people are happy to proceed, we would do as suggested above.

Update (thanks to @ArtOfCode): Of 48,961 total answers, 47,330 are imported, unclaimed, unedited and have no upvotes. If we want to go through with this, these would be the first to be deleted.

posted almost 4 years ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

4y ago

Mithrandir24601‭ staff

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