The Question-Close Police

Question

I decided recently to try to participate more on Workplace.

It turns out to be not so easy. You've got to be quick on the draw to so much as answer a question before it gets closed for dubious reasons.

For example:

Offer letter gives different commission structure than talked about in interview

It might have been appropriate to close this as a duplicate of some other question asking whether to sign a contract that doesn't contain what was ostensibly agreed upon. But to close this as "off-topic"?

"Questions asking for advice on a specific choice, such as what job to take or what skills to learn, are difficult to answer objectively and are rarely useful for anyone else.

It seems to me that the principle "Don't sign a contract hoping it won't be enforced as written" is going to be useful for just about anybody, not just the asker here.

Ethics of replaying a failed financial transaction

"Questions seeking advice on company-specific regulations, agreements, or policies should be directed to your manager or HR department. Questions that address only a specific company or position are of limited use to future visitors. Questions seeking legal advice should be directed to legal professionals.

Did the closers so much as read the question? It asks about the ethics of replaying a failed financial transaction. It's right there in the title! Or did they think it was company-specific, as though this is something only one company could ever do?

Could the idiom " What are you up to?" be considered offensive in the emails?

At worst, this isn't on topic because it should go to English Language & Usage. But that's not why it was closed:

primarily opinion-based

So on second thought, forget English Language & Usage; that whole board should be closed, as any time you ask people about how a language works or what things mean, you're going to get opinions. But if a variety of people agree that something had an intended meaning and about what that meaning is, can you still call the question "opinion-based"? These are opinions based on experience with the language, which are thus informative to the questioner and others without a native-level mastery of English.

My job didn't inform me the hospital called to tell me my husband was admitted. Can I take action against them?

"Questions seeking advice on company-specific regulations, agreements, or policies should be directed to your manager or HR department. Questions that address only a specific company or position are of limited use to future visitors. Questions seeking legal advice should be directed to legal professionals."

At this point I get the impression that the closers of this board think that any question which could be interpreted as asking for legal advice must be so interpreted. At least I'm assuming that's the reason, because there's clearly nothing company-specific here. It describes a situation that could arise at any company.

I'm sure there are more examples. (Of the most recent 30 questions on this board, one-third have been closed.) I noticed these because I answered them...and then they got closed for reasons that make me wonder whether the closers even read the questions, let alone the answers that had already been supplied. Three of the four had positive votes, meaning people found them useful.

Do people get points for closing an ostensibly bad question? What is the incentive here? I don't understand the zealotry people display in telling others that their question was crap. (And I'm not the only one.)

Answer 1

I don't understand the zealotry people display in telling others that their question was crap.

I'm sure there are varied reasons why some folks vote to close so aggressively.

Some seem to enjoy being one of the first few to vote. Some folks never ask any questions, seldom provide any answers, yet are very quick on the voting trigger.

Others seem to catch a flavor of a rule ("Legal = No"), then want to find ways to enforce that rule any way they can - even if the rule doesn't actually fit the situation.

Others just seem to follow the lead of others. When they see a vote, they chime in with a vote as well.

Some are just trying to keep the site clean in the ways they are told they can.

(As a side note, it's not hard to see that a small group of members seem to do a high percentage of the close voting. I wonder if there is a query that could be run which analyzes this clustering of close votes [without naming any name]?)

IMHO, there are far too many close votes on this site and the site suffers for it. I always err on the side of leaving questions open, or editing the question to keep it viable whenever possible. I tend to downvote poor questions, but not vote to close them.

It's been discussed many times before. For good or for bad, this has been going on since the site was started, and seems unlikely to change. Sadly, if you want to continue here, you may just have to learn to tolerate it.

I've decided that I will look at closed questions, edit those that I think deserve to be edited, vote to re-open those that I think deserve to be open, and leave a comment to that effect. Maybe it will make a difference. Maybe the site will seem a bit friendlier because of it. PLEASE FEEL FREE TO JOIN ME AND HELP!

Answer 2

I think there is a tension between to goals of different people on this site. Some long time contributors see this site as a effort to build a corpus of great questions and answers. They protect the site from duplicate and low quality questions which they see as detracting from the site. These people also have a dislike of questions which require an opinion to answer because these questions can’t have a correct answer. Others see the site as a place where people can help others who have questions. They are much more accepting of vague questions or questions which require an opinion because they see good answers as including an opinion based on experience. This is overly binary, however, this simplification can help understand some of the dynamics on this site.

People who frequent this site often talk about putting questions on hold as part of a process in which the questions can be improved. A new person who asks a question doesn’t experience this. What they experience is asking a question, having it quickly shutdown with a boilerplate explanation which provides very little guidance relevant to their specific question. If you lean towards wanting to help people then this should concern you. People who vote to close a question should in most cases provide an explanation in the comments. If this doesn’t happen others should do it for them, or vote to reopen.

Many questions are closed as duplicates because the general issues are the same, however, the context is different. This can be explained by the desire to create a corpus of canonical answers. I believe this is often a mistake. Taken out of context many questions have obvious answers. However, it is the context that makes it hard for the questioner to reach the answer by themselves. We should provide answers which address the context as well as the underlying question.

I realize my opinion will be discounted here since I haven’t achieved the score necessary to vote to close yet. Perhaps some people will appreciate the perspective of a relative newcomer.

Answer 3

If people put as much energy into editing questions as they did either lamenting or defending the number of closed questions on The Workplace, we'd have a lot fewer closed questions and a lot more happy users.

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Failing that, try to change the site on/off topic rules via meta. The first question explicitly is asking:

So should sign the letter anyway?

which is 100% this question:

"Questions asking for advice on a specific choice, such as what job to take or what skills to learn, are difficult to answer objectively and are rarely useful for anyone else.

Now, what you could have done was edit the question to remove the "should I do?" and actually write the question your answer addresses, which is basically, "How can I reconcile an offer letter which differs from what was talked about in the interview?"

However in my experience here, nearly no one is willing to do this sort of edit. So... I guess the meta wars about "we close too many questions!" will continue ad nauseam.

Answer 4

Offer letter gives different commission structure than talked about in interview

is CLEARLY off topic. Any question that asks us to make a decision for the OP is off topic, PERIOD We are not an advice column.

Ethics of replaying a failed financial transaction

Should not have been closed for that reason. Voted to reopen

Could the idiom " What are you up to?" be considered offensive in the emails?

Agreed, voted to reopen

The last one could use an edit, and I voted to reopen it as well.

If you see questions closed that you feel should not have been, do just what you did here:

BRING THEM TO OUR ATTENTION

A question being closed doesn't mean it has to stay closed. It may have been closed in error, need an edit, or a combination of the two.

The best protection we have against some members of the community being too zealous is other members of the community.

Answer 5

Do people get points for closing an ostensibly bad question? What is the incentive here?

I have thought long and hard about this and think I have it worked out.

No points worth speaking of for close votes so by my analysis apart from the legit closures (around 75 percent including edge cases) the other reasons are:-

PMS, bad day, withdrawal symptoms, drunk, high on something, and a very small percentage of pure evil and perhaps a smidgen of roid rage.

Do they actually read it?

It's obvious that many people just skim a question before voting.

Answer 6

I completely agree with the OP's post. The impression I get is that there is a small band of users that seem to be very quick with the VTC trigger and are frequently using it inappropriately. It seems to often be the same users every time (I won't name names..).

Personally, I would like to see the site moderators step in and lay out temporary bans and/or remove rep points (if that is possible) from users that are using their VTC privileges irresponsibly, or not in accordance with the site guidelines.

Also, not sure if this is already the case, but I would like to see a question closed only if 5 close votes are given for the same close category. It would help to ensure that the close reasons are coherent and cut out frivolous VTCs that don't have any real basis.

Is there a limit to how many VTCs can be cast per day?

Answer 7

I can only speak for myself, but...

Why do I vote to close in general?

To get rid of "bad" questions (specifically the ones that are considered inappropriate according to site rules, i.e. those that are off-topic, too broad, opinion-based or unclear), in order to make the "good" ones easier to find, to improve the overall quality of the site, etc.

Closing doesn't actually do that much to get rid of questions (even for those that don't get reopened), but it's easy enough to convince myself that I'm helping I can only use what I've got.

Why do I vote to close so much?

Because there are so many questions that need closing, basically.

If you're wondering about a specific close vote of mine, you'll need to ask about that specifically.

I'm probably more critical than I used to be, and you can probably find at least some reasons for that some place or another. Although this doesn't mean my reasons for voting to close are bad.

Why don't I edit instead?

I vote to close instead of editing when:

• I can't see an edit that will make the question appropriate.
• I think the edit will deviate too much from the asker's intent for me to make it (instead of the author) - it generally makes more sense (to me) to just close the question instead of potentially getting into an argument with the author, and/or everyone else, about the fact that I pretty much rewrote their question to make it appropriate.
• I just don't think the question is useful enough to put in the effort.
• Others may think the original question is fine. Editing is a one-man show, closing requires 5, and reopening seems like a more natural part of the daily grind than reverting edits - I'd see having an edit reverted as a black mark, whereas I don't really care if people reopen a question I closed or helped close (apart from the general frustration that we can't all agree on stuff).
• I don't have the time or inclination to edit it right now. Rewriting a question is hard work.

Why don't I comment instead to explain what's wrong with the question or suggest improvements?

I often do, in addition to voting to close.

Although such comments are:

• Ignored.
• Moved to chat.
• Deleted.
• Redundant with the close reason.
• Not how you get rid of a bad question (whether through fixing or go-away-ism).

Answer 8

The Stack Exchange model provides users access to certain moderation tools at a specific reputation threshold. The idea is that these users understand the SE and through their contributions have earned the priviledge of being able to help curate the site.

A big threshold is the ability to vote to Close a question. It takes 5 people to close a question and 5 more people to reopen. Each person can only vote one time to close.

That you do not like that some people are using their close votes does not provide for you to be disresepectful of their use of the close vote. Argue the merits of each question rather than making ad-hominim attacks on the people using their voting privileges.