Why do we continue to re-open low-quality questions and upvote these together with low quality answers?

Question

There is this really egregiously zero-researched question:

When did the number of motor driven vehicles surpass the number of horse driven vehicles in Paris?

Putting in the keywords of the current version into a search engine gives an immediate (simple) answer.

It was closed, rightly so.

Too broad, unclear, in first version requiring a long list-type answer, with much explanation or even frame-challenges required to contextualise any raw numbers or qualifications.
In the revised version the question is now easily answered, but the zero research effort is even present version.

Then it was re-opened despite not adding any prior research!

Can someone voting in this way explain why?

That OP eventually narrowed this down to a specific location did indeed improve the post a bit, but despite explicit comments pointing at shortcomings and explicit requests for documenting research, none was presented.

What's going on here?

Then we have an 'answer' that continues to receive upvotes. And that in light of:

• answering prematurely a low quality question
• being completely invalidated by 2nd revision of question
• without any revisions of the answer addressing the entirely changed scope of the question

• but it is also not really answering the first revision of the question, because:

  • speculating around about dates (giving "1930" initially, which is very clearly much too late, then answering "exact date" with "1925–1930", for which we see from another answer that even "1925" is too late — if it were answering a question about "Berlin" it would clearly come down to give a wrong date (too late)
  • addressing broad regions instead of the – asked from the beginning "capitals" – in other words using country wide data that includes rural numbers, despite question looking for urban data; including other cities despite only one of them interesting for an answer, with arguably much more modernity in a range of aspects compared to the vast majority of other cities providing data presented in the third hand source used for that answer
  • presents also a wide range of either peripheral or even completely irrelevant information for answering the question in first and revised form
  • not in the least a needless detour about dating a peripheral image because answerer embarrassed himself in trying to abuse me and my answer in a now deleted comment below my answer (trying to make an appeal to authority mixed with insults; producing an epic fail in the process; mods: there is entertainment value in it)

  • most of the answer seems to indicate that answerer misunderstood the question, which asks for a change in majority of vehicles, not (almost complete) disappearance of urban horses; which asks for capital cities, not "central European" ones

  • suggestion for improvements made in comments were only met with contempt and making general dismissive arguments that boil down to ad hominem attacks (which are even upvoted)

  _{@LangLangC Why? For a general question, giving a answer based on central Europe (Germany, Switzerland and France, based on the available historical data of time) must not include other areas not referenced in that answer. As to your (extremely naive) reference of the Potsdamer Platz I will comment later. (And please remember I have lived in this area for the greater portion of my life and therefore through my historical studies am knowledgeable about the conditions existing at that time.)}

  _{Your (@LangLangC) basic assumptions that the world (based on many of your previous answers) is back and white is wrong. Within in a city of 6 million peaple, do not assume that occasionally taken photos of what was (at that time) the ' busiest traffic center in all of Europe' (an area of 250 meters around the Potsdamer Platz) represents the average traffic of the day in that city (of more that 10.000 meters around the Postsdamer Platz). The area North/East and partialy South of the Potsdamer Platz was a govermental or business area. The area west a residential area...}

  _{... This is not an area that slow moving vehicles would travel through. For those knowable, serving Friedrichvorstadt (as the area was called) would of be done from areas north (through the Tiergarten) or south from Schöneberg. Just as it is true today, it was true then: trafic jams are to be avoided. Sorry @LangLangC this is something that someone who attempts to claim to be a historian should know. The world is not black and white, but full of difersities (including the individuals contained within - that aspect which you consistently which to ignore).}

  _{Summa Summarum : The idea that the slowest moving vehicle cannot be seen in occasional photos that are taken 1919 in an area considered to be at the time 'the busiest traffic center in all of Europe' as absolute proof that such vehicles don't exist at that time to be humbug. Sorry @LangLangC, allthough you have contributed many (for me) informative answers in great detail (which I appreciate) - in certain areas you are one sided and bias. In a politics forum such a behaviour is probably a precondition for participation, in a historical forum the opposite should be true.}

  _{@LangLangC That is what one calls an educated guess based on previous knowledge and conclusions (the basis of which much historical 'knowledge' comes from. Thus the statement in the answer 1930 may be considered realistic.}

• or demanding 'debate in comments'

  _{"Realy, stop adding extra questions in your comments without adreesinf the answers to your previous comments."}

Note that I didn't flag any of these comments. They should speak for themselves and allow inferences about the answer as well (then the upvotes on comments and answer make me think I am overly optimistic).
But really they also just failed to insult me personally. Although I do see that they are clearly meant as being insulting.

The resulting votes on question and this substandard answer are an embarrassment for this site.

The question should not have been re-opened in that state.

The answer just criticised needs ample improvement. Meaningful, that is.

And to the voters on that question or this answer: you are free to do in any way it pleases you. But what is your goal here for the site? Does that answer deserve these votes?

• 5 upvotes for low quality question, resistant to significant improvement
• 9 upvotes for low quality and wrong answer, aggressively resistant to significant improvement
• 5 votes for re-opening a low quality question

After this laundry list of "wrong" surrounding this post and the community reaction to it and the resulting answers:

How shall a user that cares for quality react to such a torrent of problems? If the answer to that is just "move on", I will. That seems not like the best advice.

Answer 1

I voted to re-open but I didn't upvote either the question or the answers, so I'm only responding to the former.

Most of your criticisms of the question are spot on and I have no argument with them. In particular, the question is/was too broad, unclear and lacks research. All these are good reasons for closing in many cases.

Nonetheless, I didn't vote to close (but I did downvote it) and I'll explain why before getting to the re-opening bit. At its core, there is an interesting question here on a hugely important phase in the history of transport. Despite the obvious weaknesses of the question, I felt closing was a bit like throwing the baby out with bathwater. Also, despite the weaknesses in the original, I think a decent answer could have been constructed by someone setting some reasonable boundaries within his/her answer.

Some folks here want quick closure of questions which are too broad, unclear and / or lack research. I strongly disagree as we should (in most cases I think) give people a chance to revise and improve before voting to close. OK, so questions are put 'on hold' first to give time to improve rather than closed, but there is little difference in practice.

That said, questions which are guilty of one of the aforementioned offences may also have another fault, the most serious being offensive / poor taste. Questions such as this depraved one must be closed fast (in fact, this one should be completely nuked off the site).

As to why I voted to re-open, I felt the edit had addressed the broadness issue. It still lacked research, but if we routinely started closing questions for that reason alone, we would lose a very large percentage of questions. Downvote them to show disapproval, yes, but closing for that reason alone is going to far. Further, if this question should be closed for lack of research and / or because it is easily answered with a single link (which I dispute - see below), then why not close the following for the same 'offences'?

• Was murdering a slave illegal in American slavery, and if so, what punishments were given for it? (51 upvotes, 3 downvotes - no research)
• Were there women who were against giving women the right to vote? (117 up, 3 down - easily answered by googling the OPs own question, so no research done)
• How did such a relatively minor event as the assassination of an archduke start World War I? (54 up, 3 down - no research, single link Wiki answer)
• Why was Britain willing to return Hong Kong but not Gibraltar? (62 up, 1 down - no research)
• Was England called England in the days of King Arthur? (62 up, 2 down - single link Wiki answers just by googling 'England' or 'Angles', very basic)
• Did Adolf Hitler ever address the fact that his own appearance was almost an exact opposite of what he considered the ideal Aryan appearance? (96 up, 2 down - actually, I like this question but no evidence of research)

and so on.... If we not just left these open but also heavily upvoted them, why should we not also keep the horse / car transport question open? And if we had closed all of the above, we would probably have been denied some excellent, well-researched answers which are fine advertisements for this site - and thousands of people have seen those quality answers instead of just the few hundred (or none at all) if these questions had been closed.

As to the revised question being answerable with a single link, this does sometimes depend on what the search engine throws up. I googled the revised question and did not get a satisfactory answer despite trying several combinations of key words. The link you found did not turn up in any of my searches.

Finally, being able to answer a question with a single link does not automatically mean the question should be closed (again, we would have to close a lot of questions if that were the case). Wikipedia and certain other links always come up easily (and in such cases the question should be closed promptly), but some others do not, or they may in some searches but not in others. Also, a single link may need some qualifying or expansion to produce a fuller or more satisfactory answer.

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EDIT (partly in response to comment):

On 'bad' questions, let's keep a few things in mind:

1. Labelling a question 'bad' simply because it lacks research is an over-simplification. In reality, a question can be good in some ways (e.g. interesting, significant, stimulating, clearly-phrased) but bad in that it lacks research (or vice-wersa).
2. We can downvote questions which show lack of research or clarity. Having a minus next to a question is a pretty clear sign that questions lacking research (among other failings) are discouraged.

3. Voting to close is only an effective way to discourage poor questions once 5 people have voted. Prior to that, votes to close aren't visible to the new / low rep users who have come here to ask a question. Non-spam/offensive/bad-faith questions often take up to a day or even longer to close, during which time new/low rep users' only way of knowing what the community thinks is by looking at the minus votes next to the question.

4. We can and must close and delete questions which are offensive / spam / in bad faith as quickly as possible.

Answer 2

I think SE.History has two kind of persons.

1. A small group of people (less than 10) that participate the most, moderate the site, answer questions after a deep investigation, follow the rules, visit Meta and try to set policies.
2. A vast batch of people, who ignores the rules, do not agree with them or maybe their interpretation is different. Who surely are not even aware of this question in Meta.

Only by having clear texts used when a question is closed or put on hold (same thing with answers) we will reach people who belongs to the second group. But the risk is that the site will be to elitist for many of them.

As an example, often I do not answer a question because I do not have the time to search for sources about things I already know. Also, english isn't my first language, so I always write short answers. Since the rules demand research and deep explanations, I finally choose to not participate. I'm sure than others, like the ones of the original reopened question, choose to participate and ignore the rules because they feel they are too harsh.