What you're seeing when you see 'Double Standards' is really the collision of three separate schools of thought: The Purists, Democracy-Advocates, and People who Just Don't Care Either Way.

Each School of thought takes its direction from a different aspect of the site:

• Purists - Believe Stack Overflow should only hold questions related to programming; and use the line from Jeff's blog post on the subject ^[1]:

The goal of a site like Stack Overflow is to somehow share the correct knowledge wherever it may be as it is scattered throughout the universe, and to cause that to be voted up and to be spread amongst us. There's this big universe of dumb programmers, and I'm one of them, and we all have a little bit of knowledge. I may know how to do this thing in VB6 which may be useful to somebody one day who's trying to maintain some ridiculously old piece of crap code. We all have these little tiny pieces of information and if we can just contribute a little bit, that information gets amplified, and maybe a thousand other dumb developers will benefit from my one little piece of good information. (Emphasis Added)

Later on in that same blog post, Jeff writes:

It's a place where a busy programmer can invest a few minutes with as little friction as possible, and get something tangible from the community in return. (Emphasis Added)

The Purists take this to its logical conclusion, and vote to close any topic that doesn't enhance the 'useful programming knowledge' of the programming community. Which include the questions you mentioned (The Jon Skeet Facts question was closed and opened many, many times over).

• Democracy-Advocates - The Democracy advocates advocate (for lack of a better word) the practice of including everything on the site that is voted up by users.

Therefore, anything goes.

As you notice, the 'fun' questions get the highest votes, so they must be what the community wants, Q.E.D. This school focuses on the Reddit nature of Stack Overflow to let votes determine what ought to be on the site; and they point out inconsistencies in question closings vociferously (rightly, I might add, since there's an apparent incongruity).

This group also tends to be the same group that wants to severely curtail moderation powers, for two reasons (that I can see):

• It's inherently unfair that some questions that garner 'easy' reputation and badges stay open, and others do not.
• It's a community, and should be treated as such. It's not fair that only the 1% of users can determine what can stay on the site and what cannot.

This group permeates across all reputation levels. There are users with high reputation that hold this viewpoint, and users with lower reputation that see questions like this that are already posted, and subsequently think it's "Ok" to post more questions like this, much to the anger of the Purists.

• Those that Don't Care - The third group simply doesn't care either way. They're just here to get what they need, and can tune out the noise rather easily.

Solution

For this problem to be resolved, we are going to need to have a benevolent dictatorship over top of the community driven moderation. Otherwise, you'll continually have these battles because each side has a valid point, and neither Jeff nor Joel have come out and explicitly supported one side over the other.

My opinion is that Jeff believes that this will 'work itself out' and that letting the community duke it out by itself is the best idea; but this pre-supposes that neither side is given an advantage. Right now, the Democracy-Advocate side has the advantage for the following reasons:

• Closers can now only vote to close a question once
• Questions default to an 'open' state, and need 5 people to close them
• Closers only get 12 votes a day. Out of 637 users that can close questions, a lot of them would have to be active during the day to keep the fluff out

As a purist, I understand and sympathize with your plight. I would rather Jeff come down one way or the other so we could stop having these incongruities.

Sorry, there is no double standard, there are 46865 standards.

The "rules" our collective has set over time have changed.

Back in November the actual number of questions wasn't that much and in general there were a lot of "Fun" questions.

Now it's a lot more serious and we try to keep it programming related. But what is exactly programming related... "How long do you inhale and exhale while programming?" It's programming related but we must draw some sort of lines. (yes lines)

Rules evolve, as stated in the FAQ.

Jon Skeet's posts are programming related by definition.

Seriously,

I don't think there is a double standard. In my opinion there are large differences in quality between the links you posted. Generally, Stack Overflow should contain serious programming questions and nothing else. But from time to time, people ask "funny" questions that just work (maybe hitting a nerve at the time being asked) -- this is what the 'community wiki' option is for, I think.

Others try to imitate this by thinking of another funny question that simply does not work and it's too obvious that people try to achieve batches or something. To keep things in order, these question keep being closed pretty fast.

Who decides what works and what doesn't? The voters and the guys with enough rep points to close a question.

If you ask me: This is working.

Currently, Stack Overflow is a great collection of interesting questions and high-quality answers, spicked with humor every now and then, without being just another joke wiki.

Let's not forget my favorite question: When to drink when listening to Stack Overflow? ^[1]

This is so an important issue that Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky commented on it in the Stack Overflow podcast, while stupid questions about reasons for Visual Studio crashes are, of course, not programming related and consequently not really suitable for this web site.

Here is one question that really should not be closed, especially not as "Not programming related": Fun with SQL (games, painting, puzzles) [closed] ^[2].

Question closed as "not programming related" by Orion Edwards, erickson, David B, Quassnoi Feb 19 at 22:13

Drinking information and cartoons are OK, but this one with interesting code samples is not programming related. Come on.

This one: Reinventing CMS ^[3] was closed as "Not programming related", but it was since reopened.

I'll check my comments for some more examples.

I absolutely agree man. Real double standards for "non-programming-related" questions here. Speaking from self experience.

It's more with the mentality of the people who tag a ques. as to-be-deleted. And they think different at different times based on their moods. It's all about point of view/ difference in opinion.

More to do with the trend also. Sometimes, for such questions, if first person tags ques. as to-be-deleted and rest follow the same. If first person votes up the rest vote up. That's the difference.

One is funny and directly related to this forum, the other is best asked on a PC forum... I kind of agree with you from other questions I've seen though but these decisions are always going to be subjective.

What kind of questions can I ask here?

Programming questions, of course! As long as your question is:

• detailed and specific
• written clearly and simply
• of interest to at least one other programmer somewhere

http://stackoverflow.com/faq

The Jon Skeet facts question was a Community Wiki question and the other one was not!

I don't think the first question in your question received at least one up vote!

I think the first few people to view/answer/vote on the question have can have a big pull on the outcome, after the first few votes I've noticed a tendency for people to just up/down vote based on the previous votes.

There is no double standard. Some people just choose to make insulting edits using "The FAQ" as a crutch instead of closing posts because people would have to actually agree with them on the latter.

I don't know. Why is there so much questioning about the collective actions of a group of individuals. It seems kind of pointless to me. Stack Overflow is you after all.

Some non-programming related posts are ok IMHO, as long as their value outweights the distraction.

There is some value in fun. I don't get it for Jon Skeet facts, but I enjoyed the t-shirts ^[1], the cartoons ^[2] and the harmless practical jokes ^[3] very much.

Since specific computer models these days are about as perishable as vegetables, the value of comparing two specific models approaches zero, especially since these days any old computer is good enough for most programming tasks.

I also don't enjoy the whining undertones in this kind of discussion, so IMHO it should be closed and downvoted.

Hey, before voting came along even a programming related question ^[4] could get closed, I assume by mistake.

There is a grey area of "off topic" subjects that are still unique to the programmer community and thus should be tolerated because they help foster a sense of community and do not significantly detract from serious programming questions. Some questions that obviously fall into this category: favorite programming cartoon, jon skeet facts, favorite programmer t-shirt, etc.

There is an area of off topic subjects that are not unique to the programmer community at all and do not belong on this site. Questions about changing the oil in your car, cooking beef brisket, feeding paper into your printer, or deciding what laptop to buy certainly fall into this category.

This is hardly rocket science.

Having spent a fair amount of time over on Sun's Java forum, I can tell you that SO is a big improvement. The self-policing aspects of the site tamp down a lot of the nonsense.

Sun earmarked a few individuals of good reputation to act as monitors last year. They have the power to close down questions that get out of hand. Even that has helped to keep some of the threads from running wild.

There are times when I get a little annoyed at closed questions, excessive grammar policing, arbitrary or unjust down votes, etc. But these are minor annoyances.

I can't recall who said it: "Capitalism is a terrible economic system, but it's better than everything else we're tried." That's kinda how I feel about SO. It may not be perfect, but the originators have done a pretty good job of coming up with something workable.

I like subjective and not-programming-related question, because answers at them inspires me.

Programming is not only all-day hard-work, it's fun first of all.