Which questions should get deleted (and how fast)?

Question

Note: This question is mainly about closed questions that haven't received any answers. Questions with answers should potentially be treated differently.

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First the numbers:

Duplicate questions:

• 226 questions are closed as duplicates (including questions with answers)
• 71 questions are closed as duplicates (not including questions with answers)
  • 37 have a score of zero or less
  • 47 have a score of one or less
  • 63 are more than one month old
  • 37 are more than one year old

Closed questions (not duplicates):

• 434 questions are closed, but are not duplicates (including questions with answers)
• 70 questions are closed, but are not duplicates (not including questions with answers)
  • 5 have a score of zero of less
  • 27 have a score of 1 or less
  • 64 are more than one month old
  • 39 are more than one year old

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Observation:

Closed questions (not duplicates) with zero or negative score get deleted fast. Hurray! Duplicate questions with zero or negative score tend to stick around a bit longer. Many positive scoring questions are kept, even though they have been closed for quite some time.

In my opinion, most of these should be deleted.

Question:

Negative scoring closed questions get deleted already. But what about the duplicates? And what about closed questions with a few positive votes?

Is there a reason for keeping them around, or should we delete them if they're older than, for instance, a month?

_{Maybe there are some exceptions that should be kept even if they're closed.}

Answer 1

tl;dr: Don't worry about it.

For off-topic posts such as general programming questions, there's no reason to waste your time and delete votes on posts that will already get Roomba'd automatically. This goes for any post that's closed and downvoted, indicating it's a poor fit for the site.

The idea of typically avoiding deletion of duplicate questions is so that they can act as "signposts" for future askers challenge-writers. There's no harm in having one post point to another so that people can find the dupe target more easily.

Otherwise, for questions that are closed but upvoted, well, clearly since they're upvoted at least someone found them interesting. There's no reason to delete positively-scored content (serving as a rough indicator that it is high-quality and contributes positively to the site) just because it's been closed (however unlikely it might be after several years, they can always be reopened again eventually).

Answer 2

No, current deletion system is ok

For more details about automatic deletion see How does deleting work? What can cause a post to be deleted, and what does that actually mean? What are the criteria for deletion?

• Duplicates are useful for the search engine.
• Why a nice answer (made before the question was closed) should be deleted and forgotten?