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I have recently noticed a trend which makes me uncomfortable: many questions are getting close votes (even old ones), and I recall a few occasions in the past week when I voted "Leave Open" in the review queue.

Granted, with an increased traffic to our site, it is expected to have more newcomers who are not yet familiar with SE's Q&A style. But it's not hard to see how this can go wrong: the community ends up closing so many good questions that no one is interested in asking anymore, users are driven away, and experts leave because there is no chance to share their knowledge and experience anymore.

Okay, it is not this bad yet. (But being aviators, we tend to foresee and take corrective actions before it's really a problem, haven't we?) However, this (4 close votes at this moment), this, this and this prompts me we are starting to head in the wrong direction. These are just taken from the first page of the review history btw; there are a lot more cases like this.

Is it just me, or does it feel like we are getting too fast on the trigger?

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  • $\begingroup$ I do like to point out that there are a few questions that get one "Unclear" vote and nothing else besides that. $\endgroup$
    – SMS von der Tann
    Apr 5, 2016 at 15:49
  • $\begingroup$ One thing that often gives me pause when deciding when to vote to close is if the answer to another question also answers the new question. This often happens in more popular topics, such as on stalls and logging PIC. $\endgroup$
    – rbp
    Apr 5, 2016 at 21:15

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I'd like to offer a different angle on your question. I don't think that closing questions too quickly is an issue. We want bad questions to be closed quickly. This keeps the general quality of questions high, and encourages people to improve their questions quickly to get them reopened and answered.

The real issue is when questions are closed that should not be. If a good question is getting closed, it does not matter whether it happens quickly or after many months (as you also mentioned in your question). As with the link posted by Federico, it may be good to discuss specific reasons for closing, or specific cases that may have been incorrectly closed. Especially if users are too quick to use certain reasons for closing, perhaps those reasons should be clarified in discussion.

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We partially addressed this in a previous discussion, but there we were dealing only with one specific closing "rationale", while here you ask about the general "close vote" behaviour.

I will try to give my view on the general topic of close votes at large.

You ask if we are closing questions too quickly, and then proceed to point at 4 examples, none of which is closed. I would say that it is a pretty good example of how we are not closing questions too quickly: the queue has done its job, people have submitted questions for review and the community has decided to keep them open.

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Maybe, it appears that way sometimes. The reason can be that we all live in different parts of the world and are not on this website all the time. Hence it could happen that some people react to a question promptly to close it, while others haven't even seen it.

Although it does not happen often (as Federico mentioned). However, if you notice this, don't hesitate to nominate it to reopen. Many (trust me, many) questions have been closed and then reopened. Luckily here, there is a counter action, and we the aviators can take it even after it is too late.

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