Is "don't personally know the answer to this question" a reason to close? How to stop it?

Question

I ask a "practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face" and it just gets closed -- and it's been tagged a "discussion" question.

Well, it's a discussion question if you don't know the answer, like this one, but if you knew the answer to this question, you wouldn't discuss it would you? You would just give me an answer, like

"No". "Mark your question as important"

I asked the question last night. I come here in the morning. If there were no answers, I could understand that. If there were requests for clarification I could understand that. I've got a meeting I've got to go to, and users I have to talk to, to try to explain what happened, and the question got closed before there was any chance of reply.

So, as well as my anger, disgust, and dismay, here is a suggestion:

Don't close "discussion" questions until there is a "discussion" reply.

You may think that a question invites "discussion" answers, but there is a simple, specific, definitive test for that: wait and see what answer it gets.

If it gets no answer, no loss. If it gets a real answer then you haven't made worthless the entire concept of serverfault. If it gets a "discussion" answer, then you've given me a clear indication of the error of my question.

Responding to some comments left here:

1) http://living.msn.com/life-inspired/miss-manners-advice

2) It's clearly a general problem here: discussion questions are not closed, see any very highly rated or very low rated question: Can ping out but not in, Our security auditor is an idiot. How do I give him the information he wants?) and non-discussion questions are, so I asked a general question. Since this is Meta, with a specific tag Discussion, I thought a general discussion question was more appropriate than a question about a specific post. (I invite you to respond to the general discussion question. If you think general meta discussions are not appropriate here, I invite you to make a reply to that effect).

3) On a slightly different tack, it is interesting that you want a link to a question: although I haven't spent much time here, I'm old enough to remember that the original idea of stackexchange was that it would NOT be indexed or cross-linked: "Google is the index" http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/10/search-all-stack-exchange-sites/, and I've been surprised that lifestyle-users want to make it a closed (self-referential) site: I think that's a mistake. But, whatever. That's the natural life cycle of user sites, and if you don't fight against it, it happens. I'll try harder to conform.

Answer 1

If it gets no answer, no loss. If it gets a real answer then you haven't made worthless the entire concept of serverfault. If it gets a "discussion" answer, then you've given me a clear indication of the error of my question.

Sorry, but this is a broken premise. There is the theory of broken windows which this rule is trying to avoid. It basically goes like this:

1. You ask a discussion question
2. It gets no answers (in your book, "no loss")
3. Someone else sees your question, and thinks "Oh, I can ask my discussion question"
4. Repeat steps 1-3 several hundred times
5. Someone comes along and just sees un-answered discussion questions, or religious fights or debates and says "Pft just another bunch of teenagers discussing whose cock is larger OS is better, I'll ask my question somewhere else"

And then the whole Stack Exchange model falls apart.

NOW. All that said, I can only see one question on your account that is closed, and I'm very sorry that your question was closed without explanation. It's a... problem that we have here.

I can only assume they saw a few misspellings and tagged password-reset (which is traditionally littered with people forgetting their password to their home computer and spam) and didn't bother to read the question, or edit the few mistakes that were in it.

I have re-opened it.

Answer 2

Is “don't personally know the answer to this question” a reason to close?

No it isn't, not sure where you got the idea that it was.

How to stop it?

IMO It doesn't happen, or rarely happens.

In the cases where it does happen, it is almost always related to the person asking the question not doing a good job at composing a question that is clear.

If you think general meta discussions are not appropriate here, I invite you to make a reply to that effect).

General discussions are just fine, but it is going to be difficult for you to make a claim that contradicts the general opinion without backing it up with some supporting evidence.. You have made a claim that questions are being closed because the person reading it doesn't know the answer.

I think your statement is bogus. My counter claim, is that there are questions that poorly asked. Occasionally people with the close vote privilege (~300 people) do not see the diamonds in the rough.

Personally, I can say my knowing the answer to the question has absolutely no relation to how I vote. A large number of my up-votes on questions are because I don't know the answer. I very strongly want to encourage people to ask questions about things I don't know the answer to, since those are the questions I learn things on. Questions about things I don't know about are how I get value out of the site.

Since occasional mistakes are made that result in a closed question the system has several methods for correcting this.

• If a good question is closed, you can edit and clean it up. The question will be bumped up, and people can vote to re-open
• You can ask the people hanging out in the Comms room for advice.
• You can ask on meta for a question to be reviewed, and ask us to help you fix your question.
• You can flag it for the community moderators to review

it is interesting that you want a link to a question: although I haven't spent much time here, I'm old enough to remember that the original idea of stackexchange was that it would NOT be indexed or cross-linked:

I am sorry, but your reasoning here seems flawed. The idea that Stack Exchange would not be cross linked or whatever has nothing to do with us asking for links to some example questions.

It has to do with us not fully understanding or agreeing with what you are trying to say, and hoping you can support that with some evidence.

1) http://living.msn.com/life-inspired/miss-manners-advice

What does that link have to do with your question? I didn't see anything directly related there other then lots of ads.