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This question (I believe it can only be seen by moderators and high-reputation users now) asked for a polite note in Italian asking not to be noisy after midnight. It got an answer and was deleted few minutes after by the OP.

Is this behaviour correct? Probably it was not the best possible question for this site, but it had its merits and could anyhow be improved. By deleting it, it cannot be improved and robs the answerer of having his answer publicly read and getting the possible reputation from it.

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    My impression is that the question was “I know no Italian and I'm not interested in it except for getting a message for my noisy neighbors”. And off topic.
    – egreg Mod
    Jan 4, 2017 at 11:16
  • @egreg: So, in your opinion, the best thing to do would be to leave this question deleted even if the user who has answered it hasn't had the possibility of receiving some reputation for it?
    – Charo Mod
    Jan 4, 2017 at 13:09
  • @Charo I think it shouldn't be answered to begin with.
    – egreg Mod
    Jan 4, 2017 at 13:34

3 Answers 3

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In my opinion, this behaviour is not suitable for the site. But maybe the problem is that it was a question asked by a new user, which has been downvoted without any comment to explain the reason ot this negative vote. I think this kind of behaviour can be interpreted by the OP as 'this kind of questions are not welcomed in our site' and this can be the reason for having deleted it. If we are downvoting a question because we think that it should be improved, we should add a comment explaining that. This is particularly important when we are dealing with new users to our site.

Anyway, I think we may reopen the question if other users agree.

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    I think the question should be re-opened, with comments asking for improvements on clarifying its purpose. Per se, it has merits, as @DaG says, but it's not properly phrased to suit the goals of the site. Jan 12, 2017 at 9:33
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In theory, reasonably good questions should be left on the site, especially after they have been answered. That way, many people can benefit, not just the OP.

In practice, bad questions are often deleted from SE sites, or the OP is encouraged to delete them. Given that the question was downvoted, the OP may reasonably have believed that s/he was being "encouraged" to delete the question, the answer notwithstanding. In fact, the site awards badges such as peer pressured, for people that delete posts with -3 or lower. Such posts are also penalized by lighter text, etc. And deleting downvoted posts removes the negative points from one's reputation.

Apparently people feel that it was a "bad" but improvable question. Then efforts should have been made to salvage the question, by more experienced site members, if not the OP. People should then re-assess their downvotes based on the improved versions (if any), to help come to a final decision.

At one point, I believe that it was impossible to delete questions on SE sites until after they had been posted for two days, to allow this revision process to take place. Perhaps Italian SE, being a "newer" site, does not have this feature. Perhaps the site should ask for it.

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Users can delete their own questions when there isn't answers, or there is an answer that was not up-voted. So, deleting a question in those cases is considered admissible from Stack Exchange, but that doesn't mean it is always considered right/correct for the OP to delete a question.

In this case, it seems the OP deleted the question just because the down-vote the question received; it doesn't seem the OP deleted the question right after receiving the answer the OP was expecting. Neither cases would IMO justify deleting a question, which was not even blatantly off-topic, and got an answer.

Even moderator users don't directly delete a question without first closing it, except in the case of spam or for questions being offensive toward users (e.g. toward those users who voted to close the question). I think normal users should think twice before deleting their own posts. Maybe in the case the question was totally misunderstood I could consider deleting it, but a single answer that shows the question was not understood from a user doesn't fully justify deleting it.

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