Is community dredging up bad questions?

Question

My issue is concerned with a recent post that was bumped by community. This question is fairly vague in its present form and in my opinion needs to be revised or closed since it is unlikely to be of significant use to future visitors and the OP hasn't been seen on the site for almost a year (suggesting that the question won't likely get an accepted answer either).

My question is: is there any reason to keep these questions open or is it reasonable to put the question through the close process (and allow users to argue for its existence)?

Answer 1

Community does these bumpings somewhat randomly (I'll have to look up the details of the algorithm, if they are available*). There's nothing to say that these questions shouldn't (and in fact, as you assume, it's by design that they should) get some attention as a result.

The questions can no longer be migrated after 60 days, so that option is really the only one that is off of the table for that particular example. Feel free to vote to close and see how the community feels.

^{*This MSO answer gives a hint of the criteria, that Community finds posts with no upvoted answers}

Answer 2

The community user bumps questions that didn't get a lot of attention, mostly measured by the presence of an up-voted answer (IIRC). This sort of churn is good because:

• Old good questions might be seen by new experts and get great answers
• Old mediocre questions can be edited and subsequently get great answers
• Old smelly questions can be removed, or placed on hold if there's a chance they could be edited.

While the intent is to make sure questions have every opportunity that they can to be seen by folks that can answer them, it also helps to ensure that things down fall under the floor boards and stay there (where they could just become tacks to step on for people searching for something similar).

Just handle them like you do any other question, with the additional satisfaction of knowing that you helped improve the site's answered question percentage a little bit :)