I already posted approximately fifty questions on Stack Overflow. Some were useful for me, but are completely useless to Stack Overflow members and do not bring new users to the website. I can put as example a question or another one where I asked something by mistake. Since there are few chances that somebody will do the same mistake, the question has no reason to survive.

Is it a good idea for every user to "clean" his/her profile by removing questions which prove to be useless to other Stack Overflow members?

What will happen to the reputation of an author of an accepted answer? Of course, removing an answered question is not a solution if it decreases the reputation of people who took their time to answer.

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The questions, you show as example, have been upvoted. So they don't look too localized. –  user unknown Aug 1 '11 at 0:33
 
It used to be good to delete questions with no answers that are unlikely to be helpful to other people – the system now auto-deletes these anyway after a few months. I don’t see many other times it is good to delete your own questions. –  Ian Ringrose Aug 1 '11 at 11:54
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1 Answer

up vote 6 down vote accepted

When you delete a question, all the associated reputation disappears.

Do Not Delete Valid Content

The reason is that someone else may have experienced the same problem you have. So Isn’t it too fast for an ASP.NET page to download in 0 ms? is actually a valid question, because someone else may have the same question, and in fact people were able to generate coherent and useful answers for you.

If people were able to give you useful answers that got upvotes, then you should leave the question up.

The only case when you should delete a question is if it "closable".

  1. doesn't belong on this site
  2. turns out to be a duplicate
  3. Subjective, argumentative, doesn't belong
  4. "Too localized", that is, it turns out that you were clicking the wrong button or something that is specific to only you.

... and other such reasons.

If your question has generated no meaningful responses, you don't need the answer, and you don't think anyone else could possibly have the same question, you might want to delete.

But if the question is well-formed and valid, there is no harm in leaving it up.

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