Change in my moderation practices

Question

This is more of an announcement than a question, but there's really no other way to get this out there.

A couple of years ago we went to great effort to revamp this site and dramatically alter its scope in order to rescue it from what seemed like certain demise. So the name was changed from Health.SE to Medical Sciences.SE, and along with the name change more rigorous policies were implemented to bring it more in line with other science sites like Biology, Chemistry, History, etc. Questions had to demonstrate prior research, answers had to provide supporting references, medical advice questions would be strictly forbidden, and so forth.

The hope was that the quality of questions would improve, and that in turn would draw in more knowledgeable answerers. Toward that end I took a very proactive role in moderating. I actively read almost every question and answer every day and acted on them (if needed) rather than waiting for people to raise flags and cast close votes. I did that because we don't have enough high-rep users here to deal with bad questions and answers. Without a moderator voting it's almost impossible to close a question here, and even harder to reopen one.

But after two years I don't think it's working. You can see my thoughts on that in this answer.

So the point of this post is I want the community to be aware that you're going to have to start voting, flagging, casting close votes, and taking a stroll through the review queues now and then if you want this group to survive. I will still respond to flags and close votes (as all the mods always have), and I'll keep an eye out for spam and medical advice questions, but I'm not going to be as proactive as I have been. I simply have to reduce the time I spend here.

Answer 1

The hope was that the quality of questions would improve, and that in turn would draw in more knowledgeable answerers

This Stack Exchange has many issues that deter knowledgeable users from sticking around. E.g.:

• From times to times, valid answers get removed.
• Systematically removing quote-only answers makes no sense, because in many cases questions can be answered with a quote from a scientific paper. There is no point in paraphrasing it.
• Too many valid questions get automatically removed. E.g., see 39 questions of mine deleted, and counting. How do you expect users to write well written questions?. (currently user:43 deleted:1 closed:0 is:question migrated:no duplicate:no yields 64 questions deleted! This means that 64 questions of mine were deleted even though they had score = 0 and weren't closed).
• It is a pain to ask questions: if you don't have enough references, you get close votes for lack of references. If you have too many references, you get close votes / down votes for too difficult to answer, or at best the question will have a score of 0, receives no answer, and subsequently be automatically removed after a while.
• Also, sometimes questions incorrectly get closed as “personal medical advice”.
• There is an overall pretty negative atmosphere around here.
• Overall, a very low number of views/upvotes on questions/answers, which makes us wonder what the point of contributing here is.

If you look at https://medicalsciences.stackexchange.com/users?tab=Reputation&filter=all there is a very concerning amount of users with a fair amount of reputation that left the website.

Questions had to demonstrate prior research

Demonstrating prior research doesn't make the question good: I believe we should instead close questions whose results are straightforward to get in Google, and remove the prior research requirement.