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.
I preface this with my sincere desire for the quality improvement of our HealthSE community.
This is a springboard off of the posts:
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.
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.
