When should a supervisor trash a question?

Answer 1

There are a number of reasons that govern what questions are trashed or not. The governing practices come directly from Terms of Use (see bottom of every web page here) along with pages in the Help Center (see link on the left). It is also a skill learned through Mentorship and collaboration with other Supervisors and Staff.

As some examples, but this should not be considered a complete list:

• Questions that cannot be answered, like: Which of these is a good sentence? How can anyone know, without seeing the sentences??
• Questions that are incomplete or mangled: How is? - How is what?? or whom?? Mangled might be: How daughters how look insight religion? -- We often search pieces of questions to see if we can make sense of a question, but some just do not convey what the asker had in mind when asking.
• Questions that bully a celeb or non-celeb; questions with first-name only; questions that would be impolite to ask about anyone; inappropriate questions about celebs under age 18; inappropriate questions about a race, culture, group, lifestyle, etc.
• Questions asking How to do something considered illegal.
• Inappropriate Questions - These vary and it requires attention to all the rules.
• Questions that are simply common sense, like: Do bowel movements smell? Of course they do; everyone makes bowel movements and everyone's feces smells.
• Questions that could harm.

WikiAnswers is unlike any other website. We don't simply accept 'all' questions without care for the users/readers of the site, but we also leave a fairly wide berth so users can ask a variety of questions. That's why Supervisors consult each other about "inappropriateness" and other kinds of iffy questions, so we can try to be inclusive of many people, but without just ignoring questions that shouldn't be on the site.