4

I just had a look at the history of the reopen review queue:

https://unix.stackexchange.com/review/reopen/history

I am not going to criticize the single decisions; it may well be possible that they are all "correct". But from the perspective of those whose questions get closed this is a depressing result.

Thus I think it might be a good idea to add a hint to the edit window if a closed question is edited. Something like:

Of the last 100 closed questions only 7 were reopened. Please consider that when editing this question. Usually the edit must be a big quality change to the question to be successful.

This may lead to less but better edits and to less disappointed users.

1
  • 2
    Note that users with less than 10k rep will only see their own review history. Stats per close reason would be more interesting than global ones, to see if e.g. "unclear" questions have more chances of being salvaged than "off-topic" for example.
    – Mat
    Commented Jan 29, 2015 at 12:18

1 Answer 1

2

I appreciate your concern, I regularly look what others voted after I cast mine when voting to reopen, and I often do et the feeling I am alone in giving a question a second chance. There is currently little incentive for a reviewer to comment the reason for their decision (as a chance to help the OP who is obviously struggling to get the question in an acceptable form). And although the original close voters are listed below a question, few can see who kept a question from re-opening and as such a reviewer you never get a question (as a comment or as email) from the OP on why you did not vote to reopen, as you do when voting to close.

What I suggest you could try and see if it makes a difference to comment to the OP when you do a close review yourself (if the tendency is towards closing as it normally is) or reopen review, urging the OP to do their bests or not bother.

I am under the impression that many of the non-reopened questions are not reopened because of the same reason they were closed in the first place: the OP not really bothering, or being able to, to try and find out if the question (s)he has is appropriate for the site and/or understandable by those reading it without the OPs background.

For such an non-bothering OP an extra message might hardly make any difference. In the same way that a large percentage don't seem to understand this place is not a forum and use the comments to "improve" their question instead of making the original post crisp and understandable. So although the hard numbers of chances of reopening are ok, but the notion of big quality change is IMO to vague, direct links to relevant and practical information on how to create such a change would be required.

Not knowing how to comment to the OP in a way (and with information that makes a difference) has kept me from making more helpful comments. My idea was to have some meta answers) as reference point(s) for such comments, but I have to confess it's easier just to do a quick review wihtout further bothering.

You must log in to answer this question.

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