What can we do to attract users that post high quality content?

Question

Stack Overflow (SO) is probably the best website when it comes to programming. This is due to the very high-quality content it provides, maintained by the community, with strict but fair rules.

I've noticed that the rules aren't as strict on Arqade, and that's ok, for the most part. SO is different in many ways, its users are professionals: programmers (mostly) and many of their answers can be based on facts and references.

Arqade on the other hand, has gamers. Most of the users that post here play games as a hobby rather than a profession, and tend to put less effort into their questions and answers. As such, this places a greater strain on those of us that do care, us that participate in meta, maintain the site and curate the content.

According to What percent of users visit meta sites? only 2% of total SO users visit meta-SO. It is safe to assume Arqade doesn't differ that much. Therefore, when I speak of bad quality or users that don't care about quality I am not referring to those of us that regularly participate in meta and curate the site: meta users are more likely to know the rules and more likely that they post good content.

It doesn't have to be this way however. You have many tools at our disposal which you don't use to the same extent as on Stack Overflow:

• Flagging
• Deleting, and
• Down-voting bad content.

On Stack Overflow for example, comments that offer nothing of value at all are regularly deleted, on Arqade this doesn't seem to be the case. Another example I've personally noticed is 'too broad' flags that are marked helpful, but no action seems to be taken on the question after this.

Users on Arqade are therefore more tolerant than they should to bad content (down-vote worthy, too broad, opinion-based etc.)

My question is twofold:

• Are there ways we can use our existing tools to better curate the site?

and in the long term:

• What can be done to attract users that are willing to create/maintain high quality content?

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Update

Here are a few requested examples of content that should have been either locked or downvoted (or both) but aren't:

• Should I chase down Squishys in teamfights with Ahri? league-of-legends
  • This is completely situational and should have been closed as 'too broad'.
• What are some strategies for killing a super fed champion? league-of-legends
  • Same as above
• What is the maximum Summoner level in League of Legends? league-of-legends
  • This question lacks research and is an extremely simple question easy to find by Google.
• When does building armor pen. become more cost-effective than building attack damage? league-of-legends
  • Extremely broad, depends on many factors.
• Would the 4.20 patch make smite an unintended laning spell? league-of-legends
  • Primarily opinion based and accepted answer is proven out to be completely wrong.

UPDATE 2

To include a bit more examples as requested in the comments:

I was wrong. Quality standards are actually much lower than I thought. Take for example first question mentioned: "Should I chase down Squishys in teamfights with Ahri?"

Note: Some of you probably have no idea about LoL so I will analyse it quite a bit.

10 champions are picked per game, one of which is named Ahri. Games last on average 45 minutes. A champion has kills/assists/deaths, levels, gold, items, etc. There are totally 120 different champions, each having 4 spells one of which is very strong (named R). There are walls and bushes on the map. Ahri can have 3 stacks in her R.

Champions have health, and a secondary resource for casting spells.

Time for math.

Each champion can have a relative distance to another so that gives us another 9+8+7...+1 = 45 variables.

Excluding things I did not mention (masteries, runes, summoner spells available) and things that cant be quantified (fight location relative to objects on map), and assuming distance is quantized (close, mid, far), assuming other variables being quantized (health: very low, low, medium etc), we get a very rough approximation of combinations (brace yourselves...):

10⁶¹ = 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

As a comparison there are about 10⁵⁰ atoms on earth.

Whoever declined my flag doesn't consider this broad.

This demonstrates current situation and the community's attitude towards content quality. If needed I could provide more of those, just let me know in the comments below.

Answer 1

Thank you for bringing this problem to our attention. We appreciate that you disagree with how many users have voted on some things. I agree that this site's quality would improve hundredfold if one person decided which answers would be upvoted and downvoted. A benevolent dictatorship, if you will.

But, that's not how Stack Exchange works, now is it? You cannot control how other users vote, no matter how hard you meta.

I actually find it hilarious that you bring up StackOverflow as your shining example that all Stack Exchange sites should be more like. (I will address ElitistJerks in a second) StackOverflow does a lot to remove low quality content, sure, but there is a sheer volume of content that comes into StackOverflow, that the review queues regularly have multitudes of posts awaiting review. Around here, the queues are regularly empty. They are more strict about things therefore, because they would be literally buried in a mountain of bad content otherwise.

There are also more users who specialize in a multitude of different programming areas, whereas I, for one, am not comfortable voting either way on a League of Legends answer simply because I don't know the game. Nor would I even bother to look at said League of Legends answer, because I have no reason to read it.

Non-answers are deleted all the time. I regularly see them in the review queues, and recommend their deletion. Incorrect answers are a more complicated matter altogether. In general a flag against an incorrect answer that is still an answer will be declined or disputed (depending on the flag handler). Incorrect accepted answers have been deleted in the past, but it's atypical as far as I know. And, as far as I know, the same is the case on SO.

Now onto your bright and shining example of what every Gaming community should look like: ElitistJerks. First and foremost, the name really does say it all here; banning users for spelling mistakes would be extremely counterproductive. This site has an edit function, after all. If you see a typo, you have the power to fix it. But, that's not the main reason that us becoming that won't work. StackExchange is a question and answer site. As such, huge guides don't really work that well. Not only would a comprehensive strategy guide for everything require only self-answers, it would border on too broad every single time. They do not work very well for our format here.

So, to recap, thank you for bringing this problem to our attention. Rest assured, the userbase does care about quality content, and looks to improve it continuously, however, holding our site to the standards of completely different internet communities isn't really constructive. Every internet community is different. Even within StackExchange, there are differences in standards based on the needs of the community.