Re: Proposal: Nuke negative comments

On 10.05.2022 at 20:21, Larry Garfield wrote:

> There are currently tens of thousands of comments in the docs.  Most are of dubious value, but occasionally some are useful to fold into the doc page before deleting.  I and others do so periodically, but it's all ad hoc and not especially efficient.  One of the issues is that determining if a comment is of any use is a subjective human task.
>
> However, doc comments do have up/down votes on them.  While they are also of dubious value, I think it's a reasonable assumption to make that any comments that have negative totals are worthless and we can safely get rid of them without human intervention.  That would remove many thousands of comments from the docs, and give us a better sense of what pages have the highest number of potentially-useful comments worth trying to manually review, merge, prune, etc.
>
> This could be done manually through the admin UI, but as I said, "many thousands."  Would someone with server access be able to just nuke any negative-score comments from orbit?
>
> Anyone object, before we track down someone with the nuclear codes?

I'm not quite sure about that.  For instance, most recently I found
<https://www.php.net/manual/en/snmp.installation.php#115683> which has a
-17 score, although I think that information is actually quite useful
for those using snmp on Windows.  I have no idea why that got that much
downvotes, though.  Is it because nobody cares about the folder layout?
 Is it because Windows isn't an important platform?  Or doesn't it work
(I didn't try it, but from looking at the code, it should work as
described)?  Or is it because it only describes a part of the story?

Of course, that is just a single example, and most downvoted user notes
I've seen in the past were actually not helpful (at least I would agree
on that), and I don't think that it would be too bad to delete a few
potentially useful notes by accident, if we were doing a mass purge.

Then again, the points raised by Dan are something to consider.  So
yeah, I'm not quite sure about that.

--
Christoph M. Becker