Taking advantage of this subject, if anyone is interested:
I wrote a query in Stack Exchange Data Explorer to evaluate borderline questions to the RemoveDeadQuestions script, the one which automatically deleted the OP's question in the main site (see Sycorax's answer).
What the query does is to find questions which are one vote shorter from meeting automatic deletion. However, it serves both ways:
- i) prevent an interesting question from being deleted (just edit it for quality and also upvote it; posting a valuable answer would be even better).
- ii) make not complete, not interesting questions to go away.
The advantage of ii
is that a single user can make the difference. With one downvote, it can be automatically deleted in a few days. No need to spend resources from other users reviewing and closing it in the queue (not that they were not reviewed before and failed to collect answers or upvotes). Moreover, deleting less interesting content, makes the top questions and answers in quality easier to find (I think this is the main point).
This may be a harsh approach, but I have reviewed such questions in another Stack Exchange site and from my initial experience at least 80% of them were clearly indeed abandoned by OP or lacking details, etc.
I started reviewing by the oldest ones, which I think are the ones more likely to not meet current standards. I also realized while reviewing that questions from inactive users were even more likely to be the ones unclear and/or abandoned, so I tweaked the query setting default parameters to find those.
Running the query for CV SE yielded 3.482 borderline questions from inactive users.