How do we improve our process & outcome on re-opens?

Question

Questions about supporting new users and my question about trivial questions raised an issue. Briefly stated, H:SE quality requires that we close questions quickly, but our record at revising and re-opening questions indicates that closure is a trapdoor function. It is easy to close a question, but hard to re-open.

IIRC, close and open require the same number of votes, but they don't require the same amount of effort. (can anyone substantiate that; I lack the skill to use the statistics to demonstrate what @sempaiscuba asserts. My gut says he is right, but statistics are better than my gut at estimating the size of the problem).

I believe that the site would be better if we were quick to close low quality unanswered questions and then to edit & re-open.

(IMHO, we should never cast a close vote on a question with a passable answer).

Answer 1

For me, one of the problems with the re-open queue is that it seems to be triggered by superficial edits. That is, a question gets closed because there's a problem, someone corrects a minor typo (which in no way alters the meaning of the question) and it appears in the re-open queue. Since the question hasn't been improved and the reason for closure still stands, my reaction is to vote to leave it closed.

As far as I've seen, when people make a real effort to improve their closed question, it's usually re-opened (although that might take a little while to get the required number of votes via review). However, in most cases where questions remain closed it's because the effort to improve them and bring them on-topic isn't made.

Answer 2

What are some probable obstacles to re-open (factors that raise the effort of a re-open vote over that over close vote)?

My bias is to vote yes on re-open, but:

• When I review the reopen queue, I can't tell if the question has been changed since it was closed. The edit history is a clue, but not always a good clue. I want to see why it was closed and what change has been made to justify a re-open. That requires effort. Is there a convention for how we can document the closure reason and the changes? Is there a way to make the work evident and demonstrate the relevance?

• Spewing comment streams affect the effort needed to re-open. We should always avoid comment spewage and we should flag for obsolescence when the comments cease to be useful. But I confess than when I see more than 5 comments, my enthusiasm for re-open diminishes.

• Some questions are ... difficult to salvage. I think examples would violate "be nice", but when the question is incoherent or prima facia trivial, I need more convincing to re-open.

Answer 3

Let me describe one question that was closed for being "too broad" that might support the idea that closure is a trapdoor function.

The question is Why did the United States want to “make Europe prosperous once more” with the Marshall Plan?

As originally posted, the question certainly did appear to reflect a certain bias, and this was noted in the comments. However, based on the OP's later comments in response to my answer, I realised that it was actually probably just a question of language, rather than bias. It is all-too-easy for someone whose first language isn't English to equate the terms "self-interest" and "selfishness". I edited the question accordingly.

I have been meaning to add a link to the appropriate volume of the Congressional Record, so that the OP (and any others who are interested) to read the official record of the debates on the Act in Congress (especially since, in the context of self-interest, it is illustrative to note how often senators mention specific benefits to their home states when discussing the Marshall Plan).

Because of other distractions (and the fact that the search tools on archive.org aren't really geared to multi-volume publications like the Congressional Record), it took me a while to find a publicly accessible link to the right volume. When I did eventually get around to it, the question had a re-open vote, so I thought that I would wait and see what happened.

Now, as the question currently stands, I would say that it is clearly "a specific problem with enough detail to identify an adequate answer" (as required in the help centre). Despite this, two-thirds of those who voted said that it should remain closed.

Now, it may be that they feel that the question should remain closed for other reasons. Those reasons may be entirely valid, but they are not recorded. In a case like this, how can an OP be expected to improve their question if they don't know why it was closed?

So yes, based on this, and my experience of trying to get a question that was incorrectly closed as a duplicate reopened, I'd say that closure does indeed seem to be a trapdoor function.