Let's be more careful with closing

Question

So I clicked "review". Then, my eyes popped out of a mixed feeling of surprise, shame and anger. There were 11 posts in the close vote queue! (And I had checked the queue a bit earlier)

First, just to be clear:

Close voting is essential for an SE, or any site that doesn't want to get flooded with crappy questions. It's simple:

If you feed help vampires, you'll attract them.

We need close votes if we want to attract experts and ultimately build a source of knowledge.

But . . . 

I ended up agreeing with only 3 of the 11 closures; and I think I acted rather harshly.

For instance, this question received a downvote and a close vote, presumably from the same person. So,

• Is this question "primarily opinion-based"? Nope.
• Is this question "unclear" or "too broad"? No.
• Is this question "General Reference"? No way. They have proven they've looked up the dictionary.
• Does the asker need to do more research or provide more context? Not at all. In my very honest opinion, the question above is more interesting than a lot of questions I've seen.

In fact, if memory helps, 9 out of those 11 questions had the "Needz moar contekst or research" close reason. Obviously I can't speak for the voter here, but let's note:

• With enough research, any question is answerable.
• A lot of times the inquirer didn't have the correct keywords to do some or any research.
• We're here to help learners. Let's not forget our mission.
• Overdoing meta or being too strict with quality standards backfires.

Of course there's a lot of learning to do to be a decent close voter, but there's an option: "Don't close the question."

Now, I'd like to see everyone

1. Comment when they sense there is a problem with the question. Sure, explaining downvotes or close votes isn't required, just as same goes with upvotes. ¹ But let's face it: Telling "your question sucks" without explaining why sucks. ²
2. Not vote to close questions they're not sure are gonna get closed.
3. Not vote to close questions they don't know the answer to.

Stay tuned in; we'll probably strike with more meta posts about the how and the why of closing questions, and will try to refine the system. Clearly (well it's clear to regular reviewers), we get unjustified close votes almost everyday; and for a major part lack of teaching is to blame.

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1: Some concerned ELLers in fact think there's a problem with upvoting wrong answers on ELL. That's another issue.
2: A lot of people in SO downvote without telling why because a lot of revenge downvoting or cursing happens afterwards; but I'm rather sure that's not the case about ELL. At least, not yet.

Answer 1

I'm editing my answer to bump this discussion, because I think we need to talk about it again. We just closed two questions as duplicates of each other. The first close votes happened around the same time, but the ones after that should have looked at the question that was proposed as a duplicate, and seen the comment that the other question was proposed as a duplicate of the question the reviewer was currently looking at.

We need to be more thoughtful about reviewing. Closing a question or allowing someone else to edit someone's post is a big deal and shouldn't be taken lightly. It causes newer users that aren't familiar with the SE model a lot of heartache because it seems harsher than it is at first. Don't just go along with the crowd - any one of us can miss details or misinterpret something a learner has written once in a while. It's much better if we bring our own eyes and understanding to the review queue than to assume that the folks that voted before use didn't make a mistake.

I think that close-voting is an issue for all sites with an active community. There are many questions to be reviewed, many folks pitching in to help ease the moderation load, and many diverse views on which questions are OK, which questions are salvageable, and which can't be fixed.

A contributing factor is lack of time - if I don't have time to edit a question to bring it on-topic, or to comment with some guidance on how to get the question re-opened, I don't touch the review queue. If I come across a question in the queue that is going to take more time than I have allotted, I skip it. It's better to let someone else with more time handle it than make a snap judgement.

I also have access to the tools that show recently closed question and recent reopen votes because of my reputation level. I go there before the review queue and see if there's any questions that I think could be reopened with some help.

I understand that this takes much more time than clicking through and choosing close or leave open (this is part of the reason I didn't run for a moderator position!). The standard of moderation I try to achieve takes a lot of time, so I wouldn't hold someone else to it, but I do think for new users especially, more effort should be made to help bring the question on-topic.

Related discussions

Wait a few minutes before closing new users' questions?
Less Closevoting, more Editing!
Closing questions from new users
Voting to close questions as off-topic: are we overusing it?
DO NOT FEED THE BEARS
Robo-reviewers on ELL

Answer 2

My comment made me curious: How many closures are unjustified?

So I asked rene to write a SEDE query (Thanks rene!) to find out. The query gives you the links to all of the questions that received close votes but didn't get closed.

So I ran the query for 8 other sites than ELL; which, according to the SE list of sites and their info have some of their stats close to ELL: (Syntax: [name of the site]: [what stat it has close to ELL] ||| Sorting: Alphabetical)

• Blender: Site age, Questions per day
• Drupal Answers: Traffic
• Home Improvement (DIY): Total Answers, Total Questions
• MathOverFlow: Questions per day
• Seasoned Advice: Total answers
• Travel: Traffic
• Web Applications: Questions per day
• Webmasters: Total answers

Let's take a look at the results:

_{Sorted by x
*: Deleted questions and answers not included
Data accumulated from Stack Exchange Inc. list of sites; all stats are up to August 31st, 2015.
Traffic & QPD stats are measured as a median of the respective stat entry from Aug 17 to Aug 31.}

Where x is the number of close votes that have aged away ¹; and QPD means "Questions Per Day" (i.e. the number of questions the site gets everyday on average).

Observations: We do get lots of random close votes on questions that shouldn't be closed. ELL is the second youngest SE among those, yet it has the third place on aged away close votes. And first and second place are sites that are 5 years old and have very strict question standards.

We either have

• A lack of teaching; or
• A lack of unity or meta consensus; or
• A lack of close voters.

It's definitely not the third one, as ELL currently has 391 users with more than 500 reputation (And 65 users with more than 3k reputation, in case the privilege threshold increases). Whether it's the first or the second, it is a problem we have to find and solve; because as the site grows ² this particular lack will result in real closures as the votes will accumulate.

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1: In big sites like SO, or in small or abandoned communities, this number couldn't be a representation of unjustified close votes as neglection of correct votes leads to aging away. While on sites like ELL (Where the question usually gets the attention of enough users)
# of aged away close votes ~ # of unjustified close votes

2: As the list of SE sites sorted by age suggests, ELL already has done a monumental job, and is the second to Magento's stats in sites with an age of 2y < age < 3y.