Recommendation to attempt to edit questions before voting to close

I understand that some questions are not perfect the first time they are posted, but users and moderators of this site should be attempting to improve questions through the use of comments and by editing them before they vote to close.

Here are some concerns:

1. Questions asked/day are extremely low - only 0.3 questions asked/day. As shown in the link, SE believes that 15 questions asked/day is a good, thriving site.
2. Two out of three of the most resent questions asked have been closed (image attached).
3. In both instances there were no attempts made to edit the questions to make them more acceptable.

I suggest that we begin attempting to edit the questions to a format that works within the scope of the L&IS SE site before voting to close. Comments were left that offered recommendations on how the question might be turned into something that fit within the scope. After offering such a recommendation, the writer may wish to give the OP some time to consider them and make the requested changes, but this waiting period is not necessary. The community is welcome and encouraged to make wiki-like edits themselves to improve all questions asked.

Canadian Girl Scout

• discussion
• editing
• vote-to-close

Comments

• jonsca: In addition to the below comments, please don't worry about the 15 questions per day thing. I would say 99% of all betas are not able to fulfill that, and case in point, Travel graduated recently with a questions/day of around 5.

Answer by jonsca

Closing is not forever. It's not meant to be "Ha HA, I'm slamming the door shut on your question", it's meant to be "let's prevent anyone from taking their valuable time to write a long, detailed answer to a poor, ill-formed, or unanswerable question." and "let's not clutter up the site with stuff that isn't pertinent to the target audience"

Both of those were closed for different reasons, and suggestions were left on the earlier one for how it could be improved. So, if the author isn't going to do it, please go for it, and flag it to be reopened!

I tried for quite some time to reframe that latter question in a way that made it relevant to librarians. As it is, it's a "consumer" question, which is not at all in scope. I thought about reworking it to what should libraries do with old publications, but that would shatter the original intent of the question.

We don't like closing questions, but we don't want to have to stage a massive cleanup for poor quality content further on down the line.

I appreciate you bringing this to our attention, and please do challenge these things when you think that something isn't right. As I've mentioned in the comments of another post, Ashley and I are in active communication with the Community team to determine the proper scope and course for the site.

Comments

• Canadian Girl Scout: Hi, I did alter one of the questions, but I don't have enough rep to vote to reopen yet. Please check out the edit and vote to reopen if you think it's worthwhile :) As for not slamming the door - I understand exactly what you mean, but for newbies... regardless of what you intend, the feeling of being shunned by the community is there when questions are closed. Doing more before we vote to close will hopefully entice newbies to stick it out and bear through the tough SE learning curve.
• Canadian Girl Scout: I believe SE is making changes to the "closed" message soon, so that it will be something like 'temporarily closed', for the very reason that it is off-putting in its current form.
• jonsca: @CanadianGirlScout I did see your edit, and I abstained from evaluating it to let some of the high rep members of the community vet it. I think it was a step in the right direction, but it's still quite open-ended.
• jonsca: Yes, there are some changes to the close vote system that are slowly being unrolled on some of the other sites, so hopefully that will give some clarity. If you see a question that's closed with no comment (which I don't think there has been one), go ahead and let the OP know that editing is definitely encouraged.