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I have flagged this question for closing.
And I have given reason:
Question should be closed. Stack Overflow is not a Recommendation Engine.SO is not a recommendation engine. https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/128548/what-stack-overflow-is-not/128562#128562
And I have flagged many questions (200+) like this which were helpful. What's wrong with this flag?
Why was this flag declined?
First off, I'm glad you brought this up - I had it in my mind to contact you upon seeing those flags, but got distracted.
Let's talk about closing...
That's how the question you flagged appears as I write this. The author who asked it (3.5 years ago), the last editor, and those who opted to close it are all prominently displayed. Nothing is being done in secret here; everyone who has worked to bring the question to its current status is either immediately visible, or one click away in the revision history.
Now look at this one:
Again, we see the names of the author, the last editor (same as the author) and the person who closed it. However, there's something missing here: Bill didn't close that question because he was idly browsing the site and came across a poor question - he closed it in response to a moderator flag. But that isn't publicly visible. As far as the rest of the world is concerned, Bill alone felt that question should be closed, and Bill alone took action to make that happen. This is why the current election is such a big deal: moderators end up shouldering a lot more responsibility for what happens on the site than normal users. If someone incorrectly flags a question to be closed and a moderator closes it, the flagger never gets called out; indeed, they may never even realize their mistake.
So it's important that:
You don't dump actions on the moderators that you can handle yourself. I came across one of your flags - marked "helpful" - that asked for a question to be closed which was NOT a recommendation question but merely included the word "recommend" in the title. It needed only a small edit, which the moderator responding to the flag dutifully made. You could've easily done this yourself.
You do as much as you can to resolve a problem before bringing it to the attention of a moderator. You've now flagged dozens and dozens of questions with this same, copy-pasted message. So far as I can tell, you've made no edits to any of these, left no comments pointing out issues or encouraging the authors to improve their questions, cast no close votes, and done nothing to help the moderator responding quickly understand how a question that has been around for years, positively received by the community, with in some cases thousands of views... is suddenly in dire need of being closed.
In fact, I rather doubt you're even reading these questions - the results show all the signs of someone searching for "recommend" and pasting the same text into the mod message. I could write a script to replace you in under an hour.
I'm looking for an up-to-date book that teaches technologies like RDF, SPARQL, RDFS, and GDDRL- and frameworks to make use of them. Any recommendations?
This isn't a great question... But it's hardly terrible. The author has a specific problem, which he took time to explain, and the answers attempt to answer. I wouldn't have closed this. I didn't close it, after your flag brought it to my attention and I took the time to read it. Therefore, it was not a helpful flag.
Perhaps, if you'd taken the time to explain the problems you saw in that question - if you actually saw any problems apart from the word "recommend" in the title - I would've done something else. You could've left a comment, or put something useful in the moderator message...
But you didn't.
This situation brings up something that I've been chewing on for a while.
As a 20K user, I can flag things, but the flags automatically turn to close votes (since I have the power to close) in most cases. If I want any flags to go towards my 'helpful flag' count, I need to surpass 50 close votes every single day that I want to increase my helpful flag count. As it stands, that's a lot of effort to bump a number that means little compared to how many moderator-esque actions a user takes per day (closing, editing, deleting).
There's an old adage: If you measure it, you get more of it.
We've been measuring flag weight (and now, Helpful flags), so users are responding by wanting those numbers to go up. Those numbers don't go up if they do the work themselves, so they flag instead of taking the necessary action (voting to close, voting to delete, editing the question).
Perhaps below flag weight, we should have more numbers, or a number based on those metrics (an activity quotient, perhaps)?
I think it's useful to see the moderator activity a user takes, and I think it's more useful to see that number out in the open than hidden under some stats somewhere.
Here's what I said to Shog9:
I have a feeling (just a feeling, based on my usage of flags and knowing how people react to things being measured) that in general, people want to flag because they get recognition for flagging (it used to be through flag weight, now it's through 'helpful flags' which can make a difference in a moderator election). Perhaps if we 1) Made editing and closing numbers just as visible (since those too are moderator actions), people would focus on the things they can do, instead of making others take those actions for them.
Flags should be used to bring Moderators up to speed with more pressing issues than closing a relatively old (although a bad, but not baby-killing-bad) question.
Considering that you have 3k+ rep, you should vote to close it, not flag it. There are custom views available for people 10k+ rep which show which questions have close votes - it's not like your vote won't be seen at all. Finally if you still feel you need to raise awareness about a question in need of close votes - drop by chat.
