Suggestion to help with the high closure rate

Question

We have something of a problem here on TWP with high numbers of questions getting closed. Sure many of them are bad and closure is the only way but there are many that could be salvaged - they just need a decent edit.

Unfortunately many of our users are very busy people (this is the workplace after all and employers have this nasty habit of wanting you to do what they are paying you for) and don't have much time to spend doing the sort of rewrite-level edits that some of these questions need. And frankly the site offers no real incentive for them to do so, sure newbies can earn small amounts of rep by having successful edits but it's really minimal and goes away relatively early in the rep progression.

So what I'm proposing is that there be a bounty system for edits to on-hold questions, I would envisage it working similarly to the existing answer-bounty system. A high-rep user places a bounty on the on-hold question inviting edits (with a short description of the sort of thing they are looking perhaps?) and if a good enough edit comes along then they can award that bounty to the editor.

Pros:

• Users would have an incentive to actively work to improve and salvage on-hold questions

• Askers would hopefully see their questions answered, (and new users who these often are would feel more welcomed)

• Rep-rich but time-poor members would have a way to still help and give back to the site

Cons

• The system could be abused, either by encouraging more closes in order to entice bounties (possible but the multiple close-vote system should largely prevent this) or by people offering bounties that they never award.

Answer 1

This proposal is highly unlikely to be accepted by Stack Exchange, and for once, I don't disagree with them. (I propose an alternative approach further down in this answer.)

As You Know, users earn 2 points when their suggested edit gets approved. It is a small reputation gain, but it is an incentive. When their reputation reaches 2000 points, this incentive gets replaced by the edit privilege. They get this privilege because it is assumed that (1) they will use this privilege responsibly and (2) they know how to use the privilege correctly on this site. This linking of privileges to reputation is the core of the Stack Exchange moderation theory.

The moderation theory trusts the users to use the privilege responsibly, but it doesn't tell us what to do if they don't use the privilege at all! Now we want to tell the Stack Exchange guys to plug the loophole by providing incentive for using the privilege, which is likely to get the response:

We trust the users of your site to use their privileges responsibly. If your community isn't using their privileges correctly, that is something for you to fix. We cannot provide additional incentives so that people will use their hard earned privileges.

Moreover, offering bounties for editing will stick out like a sore thumb. Why not offer bounties for using the other privileges as well, one would wonder.

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Nonetheless, the problem of closing questions which could have been edited is a significant one. We should try harder as a community within the confines of the existing system:

• Engage constructively with the askers to obtain the missing information.
• Improve the questions as much as you can without waiting to make a "perfect" edit. It is easier for other users to pick up from there rather than starting from scratch.
• Do not discourage good faith edits with comments like "your edit removed X, which changes the intent of the question". Instead restore the "removed" relevant information yourself.
• If you know a question can be improved, but cannot do it yourself (due to lack of time, etc.), create a meta post so that someone else may be able to put in the required effort. Include as much information as you can to help them along. We should perhaps consider an edit-request tag akin to the reopen-request tag.

Answer 2

I think this idea could work, but I would suggest some slight changes to make it more closely follow the model of the current bounty system.

• I see no need to limit bounties to currently on-hold questions. Like the standard bounty system, sometimes you will want to reward a very good edit that has already improved a question. This also prevents abuse from unnecessarily closing questions.
• Like answer bounties, edit bounties should be non-refundable once they have started. This also discourages abuse from offering bounties that are never awarded, as the rep will be lost to the user no matter what.
• If bounties for answers are not awarded by the user within the time limit, then the highest voted answer (with some caveats) is automatically given half the bounty value. Since there is no voting system in place for edits, I'm not sure that an automatic award would work for edit bounties.

Answer 3

I don't think this proposal will work well

As it has been mentioned in the question, there's a cons, and potentially a big one.

IDrinkandIKnowThings commented on the question

Because it requires either 5 people or a mod to close a question, and only one person can get the bounty, I don't think it will be that easy to abuse. The con may be that people may be reluctant to edit a still open question in hopes they can do it after it is on hold for a bounty.

1. Some questions are close-worthy but salvageable. This is why there's "Edit" on "Close Votes" queue. With this proposal, some users might exploit it and thus deliberately vote to close instead.

2. It's relatively easy to monitor questions that will be potentially closed (3 or 4 close votes on SEDE, updated weekly), or already closed (advanced search, real-time). Some users might monitor and analyze those questions waiting for a potential bounty on salvageable questions.

3. There's a "featured" tab that lists all bountied questions. Some users could just leave the tab open there and got notified for new bounty, then immediately (propose an) edit it.

Also consider Masked Man's comment

I am all in favour of being less harsh and lowering the bar a bit for relatively new users. However, my only concern is with making the editing some kind of a "talent show". We should certainly keep making edits to improve posts and not chase users with torches and pitchforks, but going to the opposite extreme where we start calling out close voters with "if the question is poorly written, why don't you just start a bounty to improve it" will do more harm than good.

All of these could be prevented if there's a Good Samaritan editing and improving the question before it got bountied, but then... this proposal is moot.

Answer 4

I like the idea, and I would make use of the new system

Assuming I could set aside my cynicism for salvaging questions, I think I would like to make use of the system you propose.

Answer 5

I like this idea, and I think it could benefit other sites with high closure rates, too.

Ultimately the proposal should probably be made on Meta.SE, but it is quite ok to have discussions like these on per-site metas too. One good use of this post could be to collect data and build a strong argument so it can then be taken to Meta.SE.

SE gets far more feature requests than they can implement, and we don't always understand all of their priorities (there's an actual business to run, after all). A proposal might not get traction, but a proposal that's never made definitely won't.