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Closing "unclear" questions
A frustrating situation is when a mod decides that a question is "unclear" and closes it, and yet the question is not actually unclear. Unfortunately, the close prevents anyone else from posting answers.
I've seen this many times on Stack* sites and I've now seen an instance here.
This type of close is confusing to me. IMO, the question has provided sufficient detail to the answer the question posed. If someone feels that more detail would improve the question, they can say so in the comments. The asker can then decide whether they are convinced. Sometimes, people incorrectly complain about missing detail when in fact it is all there, and ultimately it should be up to the asker if they feel like they need to improve their odds of getting a good answer by adding detail.
The crucial thing is that if you post a comment wrongly claiming that there is insufficient detail, there is little harm done. Your comment will not prevent someone else from answering the question and settling the matter. Indeed, if someone else has been able to answer to the asker's satisfaction, it is patently false that the question is unclear.
However, closing the question bans other people from trying to answer the question. It's hard to see the purpose of this outcome, since it seems like "I don't understand this question enough to answer - and no one else is allowed to try answering it either!". Yes, one could try to fight the close vote, and eventually it may be reversed, but this can be a tedious and bureaucratic process and most people simply give up and assume the community is intent on being unhelpful.
In situations like this, the question should not be closed. Deleting would make sense, after a very long time has passed (say 30 days) with no answer, because at that point it's just spam clogging up our site. But one moderator's opinion should not be enough to bar other people from actually helping the asker. Moreover, moderators are sometimes wrong about this type of close.
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The following users marked this post as Dangerous:
| User | Comment | Date |
|---|---|---|
| matthewsnyder |
Thread: Dangerous I consider this approach dangerous for the long term success of this site, in that it would appear to significantly harm the new user experience and re... |
Aug 14, 2023 at 18:46 |
That question seemed to mostly quotes from elsewhere. I can see the point to it having been closed due to being link-only. "Unclear" is probably the nearest handy close reason.
3 comment threads
if someone else has been able to answer to the asker's satisfaction, it is patently false that the question is unclear.
That is actually a flawed premise.
The question "what is the price of bread in the bakery Good Bread?" is missing details because it doesn't specify which bread nor does it specifies the bakery unambiguously. Yet by chance someone could "understand" the asker's question by answering exactly as intended. That means the question was answered "correctly" by chance and not that it was clear.
Remember that one core principle of the open internet is that anyone can benefit from it. Here it is the same: Each question is answered not only for the asker, but for everyone with a similar question. The poorer scoped, the more useless it becomes.
Now, there is no easy solution for the closure problem, because there is no precise metric to verify whether a question is detailed enough, although we can usually agree on questions that are far from the imaginary boundary.
I think it makes sense to be conservative with closures when in doubt and, when there is disagreement for a particular case, do as you did, raise the question in Meta and see what people think. It's bureaucratic indeed, but I think it is the best we have.
As a last note, often times moderators don't close a question single-handedly, many times a flag is raised by a normal user or they consult one another. This of course can vary from moderator to moderator.
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Understanding question closure
The main point I want to make here applies to Codidact as a whole, and possibly even to every Q&A site like it, even theoretically. Closure and deletion, following the model that our Seniors Elaborated for us, are separate steps. This is a deliberate design choice, and one that works very well with proper understanding. Closure is injunctive, not punitive. The purpose is to prevent overly "helpful" people from, for example, making guesses about aspects that should be made explicit, or writing disorganized streams of thought to attempt to answer other disorganized streams of thought. Inappropriately answered questions leave behind a mess that can confuse or distract future visitors.
By design, therefore, the author of a closed question is able to edit it, and the question can be reopened once it's fixed. Where Some Other sites have come across as "unfriendly", this is largely a problem with communicating the consequences of closure to everyone.
Deletion, on the other hand, is an actual cleanup step. In cases where closure prompts automatic deletion, this is primarily intended to deal with OPs who show no interest in fixing identified problems.
Closing questions is scarcely necessary at all at current Codidact posting volumes. However, this approach simply doesn't scale. By the time a site has reached Stupendously Overwhelming volume (and average levels of user clue), it would frankly be better for the most part if questions started off closed and required explicit clearance before the heavily-externally-motivated set got a chance to put on their guessing hats. (Of course, there are other mitigations possible here, such as rethinking reputation (external link).)
since it seems like "I don't understand this question enough to answer - and no one else is allowed to try answering it either!"
Sometimes these kinds of limitations are required to ensure everyone is on the same page, working towards a common, community-serving goal.
As long as it's the base assumption on Codidact that the Q&A category is the default place to post (and the place that we hope search engines will prioritize), there need to be high standards for quality in questions. Quality questions beget quality answers, and a big part of assessing this quality is the user experience of third parties besides the person asking and the person answering. A healthy community has a purpose, and attracts more members of the sort that it wants by showcasing its progress towards its goals. For a Q&A site, that means building something that other people want to look at, and paying attention to that metric. We already know that the audience size can reach into the millions.
If we're going to operate a "help desk", it would be better shuffled off to a separate category.
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