How soon should I "vote to close" a question?

Question

I am reproducing this post from MSE here, because I think it is a valuable and relevant topic. Of course we can make our own policies and have our own values here, but I do think this is worth posting:

Since it's currently impossible to delete a "vote to close",^* when I see a poorly asked question, should I immediately vote to close, or should I comment, and give the OP a chance to improve his question?

Waiting increases the chance that I'll forget, and never vote to close, potentially leading to a cluttered site.

Voting to close immediately increases the chance that the question will be closed, and the author will be forced to re-post his (hopefully improved) question, which leads to a cluttered site. :)

^{*It is now possible to retract a close vote, but that doesn't change the fundamental nature of this question.}

I'd also like to propose adding this to faq (although we don't really have a FAQ here yet, perhaps starting one is in order, it'd be a good place to put all the e.g. "if your cel is on give us your engine codes" stuff, too).

Answer 1

My thought (and hopefully what I usually do) with the "bad" questions is to start with an encouraging comment that hopefully elicits an edit or clarification from the OP. Sometimes when it seems like the OP is not a native English writer, I'll go so far as to try to reshape the question into a more fluent version. That makes me a bit nervous as it treads a line of being paternalistic / patronizing.

Answer 2

On Meta or SO having closeable questions closed is no big deal. They get plenty of traffic and it does tend to clutter up the site. Those two are full fledged sites who don't need more people or more questions. I get that you would want to close bad questions immediately there.

Here it's a different story. While I know we are not anywhere close to being closed, in fact we are very close to becoming a full fledged or graduated site, we still aren't there yet. We need all of the questions & answers we can get. To that end, getting questions from people in whatever form, isn't necessarily a bad thing and housing the bad questions is not terrible if we can get the owners to come back and fill in the blanks. If we can give them a little time, if the question is salvageable, if there is actually something there, what is the harm with leaving it open?

There is also the long standing Stack Exchange idea of being nice. If the first thing which happened when you come onto a site is have your question closed, mainly because you don't know how to utilize the site, I'm sure you'd feel like people are not being nice. In fact, it might seem quite rude. Instead, if we can get people to understand how to ask questions and flesh out their needs, we may have someone who produces good questions for life. That is far more important than shutting down a bad question. Regardless of some people's ideas of how we deal with things, most are relatively nice on this site. We need to direct people to the newbie thread here on Meta. This will ensure they have a clue how to write questions, understand what's expected of them, and know that we the normal people on this site are not a bunch of a-holes.

We were all new once ... even I the esteemed (cough, cough). Give people a chance to understand. There is always time to close down bad questions, though it may be a little bit more difficult finding them after they've sat for a few days. Let's help others create better question and not shut them down at the outset of just getting here.

Answer 3

Reproduced from here:

Always vote to close immediately. I explain the rationale behind this approach in further detail here.

In summary: Yes, it increases the chances that the question will be closed, but that's actually a good thing for a couple of reasons:

1. It increases the likelihood that the user will take notice and actually fix their question in response to your suggestions. Unless you're dealing with a particularly conscientious user (and this is rare, because their questions are unlikely to be candidates to close in the first place), it's more likely that they'll ignore your comments as long as they can continue to get answers.

2. It prevents a flood of immediate answers (arguably a symptom of the well-known "Fastest Gun in the West" problem) that are speculative at best and/or will be completely invalidated after the question is modified to turn it into a real question. Those answers don't do anyone any good, and they're best avoided if at all possible.

And no, it does not force the author to re-post his question, not immediately or ever. Even questions that have been closed can be edited by the owner. So once the question is closed, that would be an appropriate time to sit up and take notice of the helpful comments that have been provided by the close voters. And once the question has been sufficiently improved, it can be re-opened, either with the vote of 5 different users (they can be the same ones who voted to close) or the binding vote of a moderator.

If you see a user posting a second question because his first one was closed, flag and/or close the second one as a duplicate of the first and ask him to go back and edit the original question instead.

Answer 4

We're often dealing with machinery on this site

And as a consequence, obtaining further details/clarification can take a little bit longer.

This was one of the reasons behind creating the Close Vote Café chat room. I used it in the past to highlight questions that needed to be closed in case the user never got back with further information.

I would give them about a week to get back. If they fail to do so, put it on hold.