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up vote 5 down vote favorite

I am inspecting the stackexchange data dump and found a discrepancy of PostIDs included in posts.xml and votes.xml.

It is obvious that there are some posts that do not have any voting activity.

My assumption was further that for every vote there should be a post in posts.xml. However, in votes.xml are often PostIDs listed for which no post in posts.xml exists.

Is that because when posts are deleted (due to various reasons) the votes for those posts are not deleted?

Here is an example:

For example, in anime.stackexchange.com.7z the votes.xml has 941 PostIDs that are not included in posts.xml, e.g. "5" "37" "47" "30" "52" "62".

You can quickly check this yourself by using the data explorer:

SELECT * FROM Posts WHERE Id = 5
SELECT * FROM Votes WHERE PostId = 5
share|improve this question
    
Can you give a couple of examples of such PostIds (including the site)? –  Yes Oct 2 '14 at 3:16
    
Sure. I updated the question. –  majom Oct 2 '14 at 8:16

1 Answer 1

up vote 3 down vote accepted

Most of this is . Deleted questions don't show in the Data Explorer and Data Dumps. If you visit http://anime.stackexchange.com/q/5, the question has been deleted by the author. Or http://anime.stackexchange.com/q/37 and it's been removed due to moderation.

It does beg the question, should the votes for a deleted post be in the data dump. That does confirm the existence of a post that has been deleted, so I'm not sure if that's a feature or a bug.

There is a to obtain metadata on deleted posts. But it hasn't been touched for over a year.

share|improve this answer
    
Thanks for your comment. It is reasonable that those posts are not included. However, I would agree that one should should think about deleting the corresponding votes. –  majom Oct 2 '14 at 13:04

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