Closing questions procedure

Question

Some are leaving comments about the closing police.

I also think some people are closing questions to fast, sometimes with good reasons, but these are not always clear. Questions are being closed as unclear, but I think the questions are pretty clear, but I think someone people just don't have experience with the context. For example this questions (not yet closed): How to run a nunit test using cmd

I would like to suggest we always try to give a comment about why we close the question. This will make it clear for the poster, but also for the other closers.

Can we make a featured about how to better close questions a featured on Meta for a while to make this top of mind? Or does someone have a better idea how to prevent closing of questions to quickly without feedback to askers and other reviewers.

Answer 1

Here's the skinny.

Every time a question is closed without a comment, it's automatically flagged for moderator attention. I'd venture to say over half of the flags we get are a result of what you call "The Closing Police."

I am in full support of always leaving a comment about why a question was closed. If the reason you want it closed is different than someone else's comment, leave your own. If it's the same, upvote that comment.

I also am a big time (but not full) supporter of trying to fix questions instead of closing them. I personally consider a question to be close worthy if it can't be salvaged. Maybe this is because we've tried getting the necessary information and OP isn't cooperative. Or maybe because it's so far gone for us to help.

That said, I do find closing questions to be 60% science and 40% art. If it were 100% science we'd just automate it. (And trust me, the auto-flags are pretty good at identifying that 60% without a human ever touching it!)

Before we craft this closing question guide, I would suggest we look at some of the other bigger sites to see if someone has written one that we could adapt to our site. Could save the author a lot of time. But I do think it's a good idea. Normally such guides are a waste of time because people don't read them - but because the people who take the time to cast close votes at all are people who are already interested in helping the site, I think they would be the types to partake in the exercise.

Answer 2

My perspective here is that I will vote to leave a question open if it seems to me to be a valid question, and I will edit to clarify if I can.

I agree that questions that are reasonable are being closed too quickly. If you don't know the answer or are unfamiliar with the technologies involved, that doesn't mean the question is unclear. It just means it's not one you can answer.

Apart from that... "what corsiKa said".