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Related: What should we do about old and/or off-topic questions that get bumped? and Closing years old questions with accepted answers/Q&A obsolescence

This community wiki question from 2010 showed up in the close review queue, and currently has four close votes. It asks what "good" microcontrollers are available, and invites people to share their experiences. This is definitely off-topic for the site today, but it has 40 upvotes, 35 favorites, and almost 10,000 views, with the top answer scoring +35. That's very good for an EE.SE question, from what I've seen.

My question is this: is just closing these questions the right thing to do? I don't have links on hand, but this isn't the first question I've seen in the close queue with >10,000 views and dozens of upvotes. Regardless of whether they're on-topic or not, they seem to be valuable resources. I've seen questions on Stack Overflow with a note that says they're bad questions but they're being kept for historical reasons. Can we do the same thing here? Or should these questions be locked to new users? Or am I just overreacting? :-)

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    \$\begingroup\$ related: The Trouble With Popularity \$\endgroup\$
    – Nick Alexeev
    Aug 28, 2015 at 17:40
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    \$\begingroup\$ Closing and deleting are two different things, and people often mistake one for another. A lot of question are not useless, they can still serve as a bad example. The closed disclaimer could conveniently show this. \$\endgroup\$
    – PlasmaHH
    Aug 28, 2015 at 18:03
  • \$\begingroup\$ It's a community Wiki post, that was on topic when opened. Are we really going to go around and close every question when the community decides something is no longer on topic years later? \$\endgroup\$
    – Passerby
    Aug 28, 2015 at 23:58
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    \$\begingroup\$ @Passerby - Can we just close them as needed, as we have been doing lately, without much fuss about it? Only a small fraction of such questions will be touched and will need action. Most won't attract any new questions, so can't we just leave those alone? There's no point in spending a massive amount of time and effort "cleaning" it up. \$\endgroup\$
    – Ricardo
    Aug 29, 2015 at 0:13
  • \$\begingroup\$ @Ricardo as needed? Thats the problem. There is no need to close it. As op notes it highly up voted. High view count, and valuable... \$\endgroup\$
    – Passerby
    Aug 29, 2015 at 2:47
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    \$\begingroup\$ @Passerby - Regardless of it being on-topic and popular once upon a time, this particular question is bringing us problems today. According to today's standards, it fits not one, but several closing criteria: it's i) a request for product recommendation, ii) too broad (ie. it's not about a specific design problem); and iii) opinion based. If it is not locked, it will continue to attract unwanted answers. If it is locked, it will get (more) obsolete, so it will actually harm the usefulness and overall quality of the site. \$\endgroup\$
    – Ricardo
    Aug 29, 2015 at 17:02
  • \$\begingroup\$ @Passerby - Deleting the question also brings problems with the people who are great contributors, but have become attached to the question and the answers they posted to it. I can see that if you delete the question, those people will resent that, get upset, may show a decline in their contribution and even leave. That's the whole balancing act that this meta question is about. Our options actually are: 1) leave them open; 2) close them; 3) or lock them. \$\endgroup\$
    – Ricardo
    Aug 29, 2015 at 17:07
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    \$\begingroup\$ @Ricardo To be pedantic, we can also 4) Close and lock them \$\endgroup\$
    – W5VO
    Aug 31, 2015 at 13:33

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The question you linked to should be closed and eventually deleted. All the reasons why that's a bad question apply, including that such a list ages quickly, and is largely a meaningless popularity contest anyway.

It was apparently a question people were enthusiastic about early in the site's history, but that doesn't make it a good question today. Actually, it wasn't a good question even then, just that the topic was popular, which translated into a lot of votes. Some of that was also probably due to the young site with much lower volume, so people upvoted a discussion on a popular topic.

There is no value in that question. Loose it.

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    \$\begingroup\$ I couldn't agree more. I had posted an answer to this question but I gave it up in favor of Olin's. Let's not be question hoarders. \$\endgroup\$
    – Ricardo
    Aug 29, 2015 at 0:14

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