Let's open a discussion on building in quality control measures that encourage higher quality posts/answers

Question

The goal of this post is to have the Community decide which ideas should be tested on this site. Please participate!

If you do not find the time to type an extensive answer, comment, write short answers or upvote.

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I preface this with my sincere desire for the quality improvement of our HealthSE community.

This is a springboard off of the posts:

• We Need a Crystal Clear “Rules for Asking Questions”

• Are the questions threating the Health.Se Community?

As discussed, our question base is easily diluted with low quality questions and answers, especially medical advice requests and "diagnose me" questions.

The uniqueness of HealthSE is the standard for quality, evidence-based answers and well-considered questions. But MANY users don't understand the reasons, or even realize that this is a rule.

Why does it happen:

• It's understandable. Most of these are from new posters, whether new to SE or just to HealthSE - and we really are a different kind of Q&A site than others like Answer.com, Quora, Reddit without standards -OR- actual medical advice sites like Healthtap with certified physicians.

What's not working:

• We've written disclaimers and tour things, but it hasn't done much to slow down advice requests and other poor quality questions.

• It is blatantly obvious most of the time that the writer didn't actually read (or at most glanced at) the disclaimers or tour etc.

• So it ends up with experienced users policing questions and answers to exhaustion, manually writing or coping the disclaimers etc into comments.

• This is supposed to be a backup, not the norm.

How do we improve?

As proposed, we need to discuss options for mandatory quality control stops.

How this discussion works:

I am going to list examples here, and then in an answer, discuss my suggestions and pros/cons of each.

Then I invite you to copy one into an answer and add your thoughts, or propose a new idea. We can keep adding them to the list in this question stem.

• Those who have invested significant time/work into this site to also answer in a similar format with their suggestions and thoughts.
• Those who are newer posters to explain what might helped them understand the guidelines for how to ask and answer questions on this site.

When we're close to deciding, we could do a poll or voting system of some sort.

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Idea Examples:

• A pop-up that happens AFTER writing the question but BEFORE submission is complete. It reminds of the most important rules and links to more info.
• A mandatory tutorial before being able to post any q or a. It could require more than just clicking "I understand" by forcing them to answer multiple choice questions or something.
• Code built into the SE system that at time of question submission, identifies repeated use of trigger words like "I" "my" and others that are more likely to be medical advice requests. It then alerts or stops the user, provides rules/links, and recommends or requires revision.
• Code built into the SE system that at time of question submission, identifies SHORT posts or posts without links, and recommends quality standards with links to references etc.
• Hold new user posts and new user answers until approved by mods/high rep users (not in the spirit of SE, though)
• Have the "Similar Questions" be a popup to help reduce duplicates
• 3 close votes needed to close a question, 3 re-open votes needed to reopen a question

This is not an exhaustive list; I will continue to update and edit this as we go.

Answer 1

These are my suggestions and pros/cons of proposed methods.

A mandatory tutorial before being able to post any q or a. It could require more than just clicking "I understand" by forcing them to answer multiple choice questions or something.

• I think this should absolutely happen, one way or another. Doing this prior to writing your question or answer helps you write a better one. This is similar to the pop-up, but pre-preemptive. I think it's valid for a site like this. It's almost too easy to submit a question here for a new user.

A pop-up hard stop that happens AFTER writing the question but BEFORE submission is complete. It reminds the most important rules and links to more info.

• Pro: I like this, and perhaps regardless of what we choose, this should still be implemented. It exists on numerous other Q&A sites.

• Con: People have popup and click-for-confirmation fatigue. People usually click "I agree" on everything without even reading it. Then it's pointless and annoying.

• Solution/Ideas: adding a delay and/or multiple choice questions that they must answer about the guidelines in order to proceed. It could be something that only happens the first several times a user posts (including those who have 100 rep from another site!), or until a certain rep is attained.

Code built into the SE system that at time of question submission, identifies repeated use of trigger words like "I" "my" and others that are more likely to be medical advice requests. It then alerts or stops the user, provides rules/links, and recommends or requires revision.

• If we implement the other two things, this could just be a hard stop popup with links, since those were mandatory training. On its own, it only addresses the medical advice one, but that's still improvement!

• Con: Requires programming that goes beyond popups and such; I'm unsure if this is an option. But it's worth considering.

Code built into the SE system that at time of question submission, identifies SHORT posts or posts without links, and recommends quality standards with links to references etc.

• Same as above, requires programming. But very useful and straightforward!

Hold new user posts and new user answers until approved by mods/high rep users

• As mentioned, this is not in the spirit of SE. I don't like it from a poster's perspective, nor as someone who would have to approve and edit them. But it's an extreme measure that could be implemented if the site is at risk of failing.

Have the "Similar Questions" be a popup you have to click on to help reduce duplicates

• I like this for new users too. It could be a hard stop before they are able to click out of the box of the title or something. It adds another layer, yes. But it helps reduce the need to police.

Thoughts on all of them:

Yes these make it harder to ask a question. We don't want to discourage questions.

But we DO want to encourage GOOD questions/answers; sometimes this can only be done by discouraging BAD questions/answers.

These measures discourage people from just shooting quick impulse questions without consideration of the guidelines. It's easy to just see "Q&A site" and not put thought into the guidelines unless you're forced to.

It's actually maybe too easy to post a question on this site - easier than some of the other Q&A sites that don't have as many guidelines! This is evidenced by a quick look at the questions, and how many of them have to be reminded/edited/closed etc.

Answer 2

A pop-up that happens AFTER writing the question but BEFORE submission is complete. It reminds of the most important rules and links to more info.

AGREEMENT

Absolutely a good idea. Pop-Ups can be automatically clicked away, but with a time penalty of 3s and a very short text like this:

Welcome to Health.SE. We would like to inform you that if you have a question about you and your health, it is off-topic. You can try to rephrase the question to make it more general and apply to everyone.

it is almost impossible not to read the short sentence. With my previous proposal of only making the pop-up show up before 3 posts with score > 0 have been posted by the user, it will not be too mundane for experienced users.

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A mandatory tutorial before being able to post any q or a. It could require more than just clicking "I understand" by forcing them to answer multiple choice questions or something.

OBJECTION

This seems more like user harassment to me. As I admitted before, I haven't fully read the tour, and making everyone read the tour and answer questions about it seems improper to me.

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Code built into the SE system that at time of question submission, identifies repeated use of trigger words like "I" "my" and others that are more likely to be medical advice requests. It then alerts or stops the user, provides rules/links, and recommends or requires revision.

TESTING NEEDED

If this is possible, it would be great if we could treat this feature to see whether it has the desired effect and whether it works at all.

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Code built into the SE system that at time of question submission, identifies SHORT posts or posts without links, and recommends quality standards with links to references etc.

AGREEMENT

Definitely. Answers without links should simply not be able to be published (like the code-only answers on other SE sites). This will immediately prevent new users from unintentionally abusing the system.

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Hold new user posts and new user answers until approved by mods/high rep users (not in the spirit of SE, though)

OBJECTION

The problem is that review processes are not completed quickly. If all new posts must be approved, the new-post-queue will quickly be filled with so many questions that high rep users can't cope with the amount anymore.

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Have the "Similar Questions" be a popup to help reduce duplicates

OBJECTION

I haven't seen many duplicate questions here. This also is more user harassment than actually helping us reduce the garbage posts.

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3 close votes needed to close a question, 3 re-open votes needed to reopen a question

AGREEMENT

Because there are only 7 high rep users active, it's difficult to get questions closed. This will make it easier to close them. Similarly, it makes it easier to reopen questions.