0

I recently got Cast Close And Reopen Votes permission and I'm not sure how it should be used in a case that seems to be quite popular according to my first attempts to use it. Privelege page https://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges/close-questions and https://stackoverflow.com/help/closed-questions seem to not answer to my quesion. I also was not able to find a relevant question on the Meta site but if this is a duplicate, please point me to it.

Assume that the question is on-hold or closed for some reason other than duplicate for example as primarily opinion-based but has an accepted answer that I think is good and useful. (Note: some of such examples seeem to be just SO testing me but there seems to be genuine cases as well.) Should I vote for reopenning such a question? https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/196078/352669 suggests that if question has good answer, it is a good reason to re-open (highlighting is mine)

Currently, this means that a closed question will automatically be added to the reopen queue when it is...

...

  • ...Sufficiently popular, where popularity is calculated based on question score, top answer score, or views per month. We're still tweaking the exact thresholds for these.

What would be possible drawbacks of both re-openning and leaving such questions closed?

1 Answer 1

3

Questions should only be voted to re-open when they are on-topic, do not meet the criteria for any of the close reasons, and are of sufficiently high quality to warrant more answers.

A question that is closed, even if it has one or more high quality answers, should not be re-opened unless it has been edited to address the issue(s) that led to its closure.

In other words you vote to re-open based on the question alone, not on its answers.

A good answer to a poor question can still be voted on, so whether its question is open or closed should make no difference.

I would say that the dot point you quoted was added to try and get more eye-balls on the question to see if reviewers could bring it up to standard via editing before re-opening. There's much less value having a good answer on a poor question if searchers give up reading before they get to the answer.

A poor question (e.g. one that is primarily opinion-based) might be in the re-open queue, but you should only vote to re-open when it no longer meets any of the criteria for it being closed (including being opinion-based). Otherwise, it can set a bad precedent to users new to Stack Exchange who might think asking opinion-based questions is OK if they can attract a good answer before they get closed and re-opened.

2
  • I specifically mentioned complicated reason - primarily opinion-based. To me this reason is itself largely opinion-based and it is often impossible to edit question to "fix it". I have no problems with simple cases of bad questions such as duplicates. Also, why do you think the quoted feature was added by the SO team if not to preserve good answers even for bad-ish questions? I'm afraid your answer doesn't cover any of my concerns.
    – SergGr
    Commented Mar 15, 2017 at 3:56
  • 1
    I'd say that the quoted feature was added to try and get more eye-balls on the question to see if they could bring it up to standard via editing before re-opening. There's much less value having a good answer on a poor answer if searchers give up reading before they get to the answer. It might be in the re-open queue but you should only vote to re-open a question when it no longer meets any of the criteria for it being closed (including being opinion-based).
    – PolyGeo
    Commented Mar 15, 2017 at 4:07

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .