Please stop wrongfully closing old, good Q&As

Question

I am seeing a trend that is well illustrated by this question, where our reviewers seem to be forgetting about our meta discussion a while back about the word Should.

There is no need to close that very useful question about what the best info is on a DM screen. I am pretty sure that either the term should informed the reaction to it, or that an erroneous "that's a tool-rec question" assessment was made. The use of a DM screen is a 40+ year old habit in our hobby, not just in D&D, and the person's problem to solve is "what is the best info to have there" and the accepted answer clarifies that nicely. So do a few of the others.

There is no reason to close that question. None.

Thanks to the help of NautArch and Doppelgreener, we can see that the closure votes come after the newest deleted answer was posted. ?

In an attempt to prevent further erroneous close votes, I felt obliged to remove the term "should" via an edit to forestall further wrongful review responses. I am calling on all reviewers to take a little more care in their efforts.

And, please, everyone, read and Review the Meta that @Someone_Evil posted about the word Should a while back.

Note on the question that got me to speak up:
Per the linked timeline, the question popped into the review queue thanks to a new answer of unimpressive quality that has received at least one down vote. That's not a bad response, but closing that particular question is a bad response. The arrival of a bad answer is not a good reason to close that question. The question and the answers that have sat there for Over Five Years are good, on topic, and useful.

Answer 1

Community curation appears to be working as intended.

There will always be disagreements about curation. We do our best to provide meaningful guidance here on meta for curation best practices, but there will still be disagreements. In the case of this question, it is not obvious that this question is as black and white as you seem to think it is. In the questions six year history, it has appeared in the close votes queue six times and accumulated 18 closure votes compared to 18 Leave Open reviews. Over time, it seems that reviewers have been pretty evenly divided over the state of the question.

The question has remained open through every review, which seems consistent with our guidance on good subjective. So to me, it seems we don't actually have a problem here. The number of users who thought the question should be closed is not insignificant, so it seems inappropriate to simply dismiss their input. The correct response, which you implemented, is to ask yourself, "why does this question keep showing up in the close queue?" and then fix the inconsistency. This is, again, community curation working as intended.

It is a problem when problematic closure votes are consistently affirmed in the review queue, but that should still make us reflect on the guidance we have to see if our guidance is insufficient, obsolete, or actually just being ignored by a problematic few.

It's only wrong if there is policy.

You are the outspoken champion of "guidance, not policy". In this situation, we have both. We have policy that says tool rec questions are off topic, and we have guidance that tells us what it looks like. If we assume good faith on the part of reviewers who voted to close, we must assume that they are faithfully trying to apply existing guidance on what a tool rec is. This is not wrong. In fact, this is exactly what we are supposed to do - apply existing guidance as we understand it.

Now, I think you're on the right track here in pointing out the meta discussion about the word "should", but instead of framing it as "you guys are wrong, go read this discussion that you probably missed", we should instead be asking how we can improve our guidance on tool rec closures to properly integrate the relevant guidance from the Should meta.

Answer 2

The arrival of a bad answer is not a good reason to close that question.

It isn't necessarily a bad answer itself that might cause folks to close-vote a question, especially if the question is old. More likely is that this is simply the first time some users are seeing those questions. The reason for closure in that case is simply that off-topic questions should be closed as off-topic, regardless of how old they are or whether they have answers or high scores.

Closed questions don't disappear if they are positively scored or answered, so there's nothing to worry about in that regard. Closed questions also prevent people from posting new, bad answers (many new answers to old questions [NATO] are bad, because old questions worth answering usually already have [plenty of] good answers), so it seems like an ideal thing to do from that perspective, as well, if the question is off-topic anyway.

In an attempt to prevent further erroneous close votes

It's important to remember that others have the right to vote or not vote as they see fit. Framing this as "others are making mistakes, they should do what I think instead" is dangerous and ultimately not very constructive. Users can and will disagree with you on whether something ought to be closed... and they likely will be right, at least some of the time. That's why we have (for the most part) consensus closure procedures. If you disagree that something should be closed, the proper course of action is to cast a reopen vote (or a Leave Open action in the CV queue).

Alternatively, as you've said, you can review the question more closely for a way to edit it so that it's on-topic (or appears less like it's off-topic, at least) without changing OP's question or meaning. But it's also not a voter's responsibility to try and edit a question into shape when they come across it in the wild, or even in the CV Queue; it's the OP's job to make sure their question is on-topic.

Making a meta post about a subject should be a last resort rather than a first, because that's what will result in the Meta Effect landing on said question. Even if one intentionally invokes said effect (and they never should... that's abuse), it's a dangerous gambit, because if the whims of Meta disagree with you, then you've just invited a lot more scrutiny and attention in the opposite direction of what you were hoping for. Of course, RPG.SE's Meta Effect is going to be a drop in the bucket compared to a larger site, but it's still a thing to be cognizant of.