From https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/120186/170584:
And it is that [vote-to-close] request, not the persons, with which I take grievance. . .
Is it an acceptable practice to ask for votes to close a question?
Stack Overflow is a highly democratic website, so I would assume it is perfectly fine. However, at least one user in the linked question thinks it is unacceptable to do so. I'd like an somewhat-definitive answer on this one.
There is actually an automated system that "asks" people to consider voting to close, and encourages us to dive in looking for content to give the axe to. Two systems, actually; The /review and /tools (available only to appropriate rep. users)
The dynamics are different, of course... but the overall point is that it is desired that users with close-vote ability will go and seek content to close.
What Charles Sprayberry and Popular Demand say is all correct too, of course. A user should be honest about said content, and users voting to close should always do so thoughtfully, no matter how they came across the question in the first place.
Without looking at the specific case(s) mentioned in the linked chat, I see this behavior as positive. SE sites, especially SO, generate a tremendous amount of content. Since we allow anyone on the Internet to submit that content, some of it will inevitably be garbage. Every user with close vote privileges is responsible for cleaning and curating to keep our communities useful, and we should make that job as painless as possible.
The important thing here is that you can't force anyone to cast a close vote; you can only encourage them to visit questions with the suggestion of voting to close. If they disagree with you, they may just as easily upvote, or bookmark it for possible later reopen-voting.
Of course, it's possible to take this too far, but that's no reason to ban it. Every tool in the world can be abused. The proper response is to try to change the abusers' behavior, not ban tools.
I see no problems with asking for a user to review a question and provide a close-vote, assuming that the question/answer is reviewed and the vote to close is not blindly given.
I would almost consider this to be a good practice to try to get bad questions closed quickly. Duplicative/inferior questions bring down the usefulness of the site and should be avoided; the longer they last the more likely they will get votes and become questions that show up in searches for a given term.
If the question is truly duplicative or inferior removing it from the site as soon as possible should be a goal. It ensures that the good information is more easily found and given more prominence, this is a good thing in my opinion.
I have repeatedly asked others to close obvious duplicate questions, and have even used extensions that make the process easier.
Just a note: other communities frown upon soliciting votes on debates. For example, Wikipedia has a concept called Canvassing:
In general, it is perfectly acceptable to notify other editors of ongoing discussions, provided that it is done with the intent to improve the quality of the discussion by broadening participation to more fully achieve consensus. However, canvassing which is done with the intention of influencing the outcome of a discussion in a particular way is considered inappropriate.
Asking others to check on a question is of course acceptable. But asking others to "please close", as some extensions facilitate is no longer neutral.
Should we reword "cv-pls" into something more neutral? I don't know. I just wanted to share a perspective from a different community (Wikipedia).
