Add a vote *not* to close button to counter the vote to close for questions that might have dissenting votes

Question

To close a question that might be conceived to be against homework policy, or lacks clarity only 4 users need to vote to close it.

But some obscure questions might be unclear to a majority of the users, but clear to a small minority and those questions gather up close votes quickly, almost with a herd mentality. I have come across this several times, where a question is almost perfectly clear to me, but others don't understand it (out of their field) and quickly close the question before any answers are posted. This leads to frustration and loss of time from both the poster and the dedicated users of this site.

I propose to add a vote not to close in the community reasons to close a post. This will allow dissenting votes to be heard, or at least seen. This might reduce the herd mentality as it will show X people have voted to close, and Y people have voted not to close.

This would preempt the Close first, and the vote to open later process.

I believe this change will improve the experience of this community. Some of us have been active since the beta days 11 years ago and are so happy to be part of this experience, and want nothing more to welcome more and more people to be apart of [Physics.SE].

I read this meta post which claims that there is considerable inertia in the system not to change the close vote mechanics. That is understandable, but is the overall [SO] ecosystem so rigid? From a technical point of view, it would be just another reason to close, but with a negative effect on the total vote to close score. That does not seem to be a great challenge to me.

Answer 1

You can do this from the review queues, but not from the question.

It used to be the case that our close queue was generally not much larger than the maximum number of close votes you can cast in a day, currently 24. In those days, if there was a question you wanted to keep open, you could pop over to the close queue, spend ten or fifteen minutes helping to curate your community, and be reasonably certain that your question of interest would appear in that workflow.

Right now the close queue is too big for that to work well (it shows me 99 questions to review). But that may be because the number of close queue reviewers is currently pretty small, with only about a dozen reviewers active this month, and only four (!) users averaging more than one close review per day. This is a case where just a couple of additional people could make a habit of visiting the review queues and have a big impact on the process.

Other options, from less effort to more effort, include:

• Add the question to your list of followed/favorited/bookmarked posts, so you can come back later and keep an eye on its progress.

• Add a comment explaining why you think the close voters are mistaken and the question is actually on-topic. (But: politely. While it may be the case that close voters are big stupid doo-doo heads who want nothing more than to suck the fun out of everything, we don’t have to tell them about it.)

• Edit the question so that it is more obviously on-topic. But be careful not to change it to a different question. I often leave comments of the form “this question (v1) is probably off-topic, but a related question that was like X might work for us.”

• Answer the question. I have certainly read questions that I thought were unclear, then read answers which made me say “oh, so that’s what the question was actually about.”