If you can find a node that won't get any votes, then just vote it down and "consider" it with a reason of "delete, duplicate" and it will be gone in 20 minutes, probably without a single person bothering to check whether it was really a duplicate or not.

My point? A lot of monks are trying to be helpful but taking the time to actually consider a node is quite a bit of work given the number of nodes submitted for consideration each day.

Even vroom felt that a 3:1 majority wasn't enough to warrant the deletion of a node. And he has even restored at least one node that got reaped for the reason you advocate above.

Reaping isn't going to amount to even a drop in the bucket when it comes to saving disk space. The real value in eliminating "useless" content is to make it easier to find the best content. But for that to be at all successful we would have to reap 70% of the content. Do you really want to do that??

I advocate enhancing Super Search so that it at least sorts results by reputation.

I also encourage those trying to turn PerlMonks into some kind of "clean knowledgebase" by deleting things to instead work on selecting a dynamic subset that can be used as that.

I don't want PerlMonks to be a "knowledgebase". It is much more than that. It is an interesting and fun community with a rich history. Why throw that away?

As I think I mostly agree with you but my annoying predilection to counterpoint has gotten in the way here, a number of clarifications are in order:

-While you are probably correct that some people don't pay attention to how they vote, I try hard not to be in that group, I often abstain when I am not certain of my vote, and I often vote to "keep" against the flow. I do find it a bit difficult to believe that a majority of people would go to the consideration page only to vote with their eyes closed, but I guess neither of us will ever know for sure.

-I certainly didn't intend to "advocate" any particular voting margin as sufficient condition for deletion, I was simply observing the apparent inconsistency between those votes and the responses in this thread.

-I know the disk space used by reaped nodes isn't important to most (aren't they all kept anyway?), but I my mention of CPU was to address the effort in searching. I didn't suggest reaping 70% or even 1% of the content, as I am quite happy with 99.99% of it as it stands already.

-Getting Super Search to sort by reputation would be great - sign me up!

Finally I do regret my use of the rather sterile term "help database", as I certainly do enjoy many of the completely irrelevant threads that occur here (just the other day I was arguing in the CB that Cheese was a good example of something that should not be reaped due to the amusement it generated, though maybe it's an argument for a cooling-off period on deletions... no, too many trolls in these woods). At the same time, you will be hard pressed to convince me of the short term or long term value of "thank you" nodes (perhaps we can agree to disagree on that small point). I also neglected to cheer loudly for the nodes that seekers post to summarize a thread and explain their eventual solution (summing-up well usually gets ++ from me).

I believe that Nodes to Consider (imperfect though it is) can be a good noise filter if used properly. I hope this node isn't deleted...

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I'd like to be able to assign to an luser

I'll skip all of the side issues that I see being covered elsewhere.

I believe that Nodes to Consider (imperfect though it is) can be a good noise filter if used properly.

I didn't suggest reaping 70% or even 1% of the content, as I am quite happy with 99.99% of it as it stands already.

What possible good does a 0.01% reduction in noise (or even 1%) give us? It doesn't make searching faster or easier ("Oh, thank vroom that I only have 198 matches to drudge through instead of 200"). Even a 10% reduction would be hard to notice. And Nodes to Consider is never going to give us a 1% noise reduction.

So what is the harm? I see several but I'll skip to the big one. Where do we draw the line? I don't want to condone the treading upon that slippery slope of "that doesn't seem useful, let's just delete it"!

Go look at NodeReaper's stash and marvel at all of the interesting nodes with interesting replies that have been reaped quite recently! A lot of them are off topic or "poorly researched", sure. But did reaping them serve some useful purpose? Now we have threads with ugly, nearly missing heads.

I like the cultural/historical accuracy that is maintained by keeping all of the "same answer but not as fast/good" and "thank-you note that doesn't bother to sum anything up" and even the "this guy actually posted 14 thank-you notes". I don't like the idea of taking someone's thank-you note and just throwing it away!

But, more importantly, I think that drawing the line very clearly past the "useless" category is important. Reap trolls and true duplicates (I'm not even in favor of reaping personal attacks).

        - tye (but my friends call me "Tye")