Can we allow reopen votes early?

Question

I have recently noticed that several pretty good questions getting nominated for closing. I feel people are getting far too pedantic & trigger happy about nominating questions for closing.

Here's one example:

What is the optimal bank angle to accomplish a given turn in a glide?

This only has one close vote for now but there's other questions that actually came to the 5 vote mark or close.

Well, it's a democracy I guess so I can't really complain but I was wondering why do we have to make people wait till after the damage is done (i.e. 5 votes cast and question put on hold) before we allow others to cast re-open votes on questions that we think are unfairly nominated for closing?

e.g. It'd be nice to be able to already case a re-open vote thus nullifying the one close vote right away. I would hate to not notice a good question been put on hold by the Pedantic Army and then seeing such a good question relegated to the trash can.

Answer 1

If you want to contest close votes, the proper venue is the close vote review queue where you can vote "Leave Open" on posts that have accumulated close votes. Close votes naturally age away over time if the post remains open (they expire after 4 days if the question has at least 100 views, or 14 days otherwise). If enough reviewers vote "leave open" in the review queue then that post is removed from the queue and existing close votes will age away faster than normal. The post is still closable by casting close votes directly from the question but its removal from the queue will reduce its visibility for attracting more close votes. See the help center topic on close votes for more details.

Other options you have to disagree with close votes are to leave comments. You can comment on why you think the close reason is invalid. You can also edit and improve the post addressing the concerns of the close voters and then ping them in a comment so they can look at the changes and potentially retract their close vote.

If you are worried that you'll miss a good post that was wrongly closed, you can monitor recently closed posts with a search or with the "10k" moderator tools.

Answer 2

There is already a regular voting system where you can vote up or down at any time. The idea of close votes is that if 5 higher rep users think it should be closed (regardless of others that may disagree), then there is a valid concern that needs to be addressed before re-opening it. Hopefully this leads to questions that are higher quality and closer to the main topics of the site. Having "don't close" votes would make that more difficult. Mods do have the power to open/close questions unilaterally if needed.

If you are concerned about a question being closed, posting a comment or maybe editing the question is a better option than simply voting against it being closed. Explain why the question should stay open, or improve it to make it more likely to stay open. If you think there is a larger issue, you can post a specific question here for further discussion.

Also, I believe this ends up in favor of questions remaining open. If 5 people want a question closed and 5 want it opened, this is a tie but the question is re-opened. It then takes 5 more votes to close the question. This means that 5 reopen votes will overrule up to 9 close votes. The reopen votes have to wait for the first 5 close votes, but that's a small price to pay for being able to win with barely a third of the votes. Of course with more votes this goes back and forth, but for the number of high-rep users we have voting, we seem to be in the range where most questions are more likely to remain open.