[pc86]

> I guess, but Zookeepers could also potentially talk about "What are the pros and cons of Gorillas vs Sharks?"

And on an appropriate forum with as many readers as SO/SE you'd likely get well-thought out responses going far into detail regarding purchase cost, habitat maintenance, prevalence of skilled keepers, etc. Someone who actually was deciding whether to add a Gorilla enclosure or a shark aquarium would find it a very enlightening post.

I understand you created SO/SE and want to see it move in a certain direction, but closing and deleting questions you don't like because it threatens your "science-in-the-small" goal is, I think, a terrible way to go about it.

(FTR, I understand Jeff is not personally going around deleting stuff on the site)

[Stefan_H]

You hit the nail on the head... "an appropriate forum with as many readers as SO/SE"

Stack overflow on the other hand is for people to:

[A]sk practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face. Chatty, open-ended questions diminish the usefulness of our site and push other questions off the front page.

[pc86]

Thanks for the reply, Stefan, but I think you misunderstood what I meant by "appropriate" (thought I understand your use); I meant the zoological equivalent of SO/SE (Zoooverflow?)

[MaysonL]

* Chatty, open-ended questions diminish the usefulness of our site*

How, pray tell?

[finnw]

Because they scare off the experts who post the really useful (i.e. practical) answers.

If too many of them leave, the site becomes useless.

The people who answer (and upvote) questions like "What's your favourite programmer cartoon" do not think this through - they just see something funny and click the upvote button. People have argued "but this got upvoted so it must be good" since the site started, but it just isn't true.

[pc86]

There's a world of difference between "I want to learn Perl or Python, what are the pros and cons of each?" and "What's your favorite programming cartoon?"

I think moderation efforts would be much better spent directing the answers to the open-ended questions away from monoglotist flame wars and toward an honest discussion (there's that word again) of something.

I don't think anyone would complain about aggressively closing questions like the one you posited.

[codinghorror]

You start attracting the people more interested in discussion than actually Getting Things Done. Bikeshed discussions become the order of the day, and why not, because they are so fun and easy to answer -- everyone's got an opinion to share. And they generate huge amounts of reputation because they're easy to process. "Yup, GOTO sure is terrible, preach it brother, {upvote}"