Are we closing questions too quickly?

Question

I have been seeing an unfortunate trend lately. Quite a lot of questions get a closing question quite quickly. For example this question by George was just 1 hour old, when there was 1 close vote for it (marking it as being too localized). Now the code given in the question might be specific to George's case, but the question definitely is not localized or narrow.

Often questions by new users quickly get close votes, mainly because they do not provide enough information. If we close the question quickly, without waiting for the user to come back and expand the question, then it leaves a very bad first impression for new users, and they will never come back.

I can't find it right now, but there was a question a week or so back, when it was voted to close as a duplicate of another, when it clearly wasn't.

One major problem with the close votes, is that it is not possible to cancel it out. What I mean is, that If I see a close vote, I can't cancel out that close vote anyway. The most I could do, is to go in the reviews, and in select the 'keep open' option. I'm not quite sure what that does.

Does anyone else feel that we should do something about this, or am I over reacting?

Answer 1

About the mechanics

• It takes five community votes and/or one moderator vote to close a question. Don't worry if you see a stray close vote or two--sometimes these are made in haste or are just plain mistaken.

• "Second, the much-requested “reopen queue” has been introduced. The sister component to the close queue, this queue contains questions that have votes to reopen them. Reviewers may elect to further vote for reopening, or to opine that the question should stay closed (one moderator “leave closed” response - or three such responses from ordinary users - will remove the post from the queue)." (From an SE team e-mail this week.)

Comments

When a question already has an answer and clearly is a duplicate, we are doing everybody a favor by closing it quickly: the original asker gets an immediate answer, others don't waste their time duplicating past work, and future searchers see an organized site. I have begun to feel, though, that we ought to change what we say when we close such questions posed by new users. Rather than seeming to say "this is a dup, dummy--didn't you search first?" we should say "Congratulations! There's already an answer to your question and it's at [link]. We're closing your version to keep our site well organized, but we would love for you to post additional questions or new followups to this one."

Over time, I have learned that we should interpret "duplicate" in a fairly narrow sense: not only should the question be a duplicate, it should be clearly the same question. If it takes some work or explanation to show why the questions are duplicates, then we should favor keeping both of them open. We can provide links between the two in comments (especially when they are only distantly related) or, better, by editing the duplicate question itself. The format favored by SE is to edit the question and append a tag line at the end like the following example. This makes the link apparent to all readers without having to wade through the comment threads.