The quality of questions in terms how professional or advanced they are comes up again and again on meta. Joel answered when that came up once with:

"There are basically two ways discussion groups can go. They can stick with the same people (who are learning and getting smarter) or they can stick with the same subject. If they stick with the same people, the only way to keep them entertained is to get more and more esoteric until you have a site where nobody can get useful information except the 14 old-timers who have been around since the beginning. This is nice for the 14 old-timers, but doesn't make the Internet a better place. If you stick with the same subject, eventually the old-timers get bored. That's a better outcome, I think. I think the old-timers would be better served by finding a new area to learn about that's challenging and interesting."

 

Do you agree with him on this and how do you determine if a question is too basic?

#Thing 1: No Safties on the Mod Hammer

#Thing 2: Decorum Uber Alles

#Thing 3: User Reputation Management

The quality of questions in terms how professional or advanced they are comes up again and again on meta. Joel answered when that came up once with:

"There are basically two ways discussion groups can go. They can stick with the same people (who are learning and getting smarter) or they can stick with the same subject. If they stick with the same people, the only way to keep them entertained is to get more and more esoteric until you have a site where nobody can get useful information except the 14 old-timers who have been around since the beginning. This is nice for the 14 old-timers, but doesn't make the Internet a better place. If you stick with the same subject, eventually the old-timers get bored. That's a better outcome, I think. I think the old-timers would be better served by finding a new area to learn about that's challenging and interesting."

Do you agree with him on this and how do you determine if a question is too basic?

Thing 1: No Safties on the Mod Hammer

Thing 2: Decorum Uber Alles

Thing 3: User Reputation Management

This applies just as much for Closes as Deletes, by the way.

#Thing 2: Decorum Uber Alles

As a moderator, you don't get the luxury of cussing people out. Occasional slips need to be apologized for. We do deliver sternly worded warnings, but these warnings need to be done in a professional tone using words that don't have high emotional resonances with them. Moderator Notices are the big-gun on this, but this also applies to corrective-comments when you're trying to adjust behavior.

#Thing 3: User Reputation Management

Anytime a mod does something to a question or answer it affects user reputation. Migrating a question with answers removes those answers from the answerer's rep-chart when they next get recalculated. Deleting a question removes everyone's reputation (including negatives). Locking a question prevents further rep-earning. Protecting a question prevents brand new users from contributing. ComWiki removes everyone's rep-earning.

This, by the way, is why the Historical Significance lock came into existence; for questions that should go away, but are too heavy in reputation-significance to delete. It's a compromise.

People work hard for their rep points. People notice a lot when their rep drops a thousand points because you deleted a question/answer that had 100 upvotes on it.

The more rep-weight a piece of content has, the more certain you have to be of your justifications for removing that piece of content.

#Thing 1: No Safties on the Mod Hammer

One thing that the StackExchange team is quite clear about is that Thou Shalt Not Go On Delete Binges Without Community Approval, and it is best if you do it in a group and not just lone-Mod it. I made this exact mistake when I first got my diamond, and is has been made clear to me where my errors lay.

Getting your diamond does not mean you have a license to kill old/busted/invalid content. Community oversight is paramount. In fact, it is best to do as several people have done and to identify some Data.stackexchange.com queries that identify bad content, have people validate that it does indeed return bad content with few false positives, and only unleash the Mod-Weedwhacker after all of that has gone through meta.

Secondly, weedwhacking deprives people of valuable, valuable flag-rank. We had enough low-hanging fruit for a single Marshal-badge earner, everything left are edge cases or stuff superseded by FAQ changes.