I just wanted to point out that GIS forum has an exceptional amount of [closed] and [on hold] questions.
Most of these questions are perfectly fine and it is not certain why several users keep nagging askers to elaborate more and more.
What happens is that good questions miss the opportunity to be answered, users go back to ESRI's forum and those who do stay make their questions so long that no one wants to read it.
I suspect that I may be one of those "several users [who] keep nagging askers to elaborate" and so I will respond by writing why question (and answer) quality is important to me.
I think the way GIS SE and other Stack Exchanges work, and work so well, is because they are not forums, certainly not discussion forums. They are Q&A sites that offer focussed Q&A. This is very different to some other Q&A sites where providing any answer to any question is encouraged, or at least tolerated.
My understanding, and remember that I am but one of its 151,000 users, all of who can help curate its content, is that we seek to provide clear answers to clear GIS questions within the scope broadly defined in our Help Center. I note that you have not yet taken the 2-minute Tour that would have helped to inform you of this.
There will always be grey areas where some of our users think a particular question should be closed and others do not. We are fortunate to already have 338 users who have been engaged with the site for long enough, and intensively enough, to earn the cast close and re-open votes privilege which means the decision for a question to be placed and remain on hold (pending improvement) and later closed (if not) is not left to just one or a few people.
The questions which we want to stay open are those which will have benefit to many more people than just their original asker. We want people finding our Q&As through searches to be able to quickly understand what is being asked, so that they can decide whether it is the same as what they might otherwise have to ask and wait for an answer on. Assuming that there is a similarly clear answer then they just have to read it and get back to what they are doing.
I do not enjoy seeing questions closed, but I certainly enjoy seeing questions improved to a standard where they can be answered equally clearly. I think the process of closing them, to give their askers the chance to improve them, is best done soon after they are asked, because that is when askers are most likely to be watching their question and are available to be able to provide the necessary clarifications.
I think the quote below from We're working on a new stat to help convey the reach of your posts here sums up why we focus on the content/quality of the Q&As rather than simply on providing answers.
You gotta get this to get us.
... One thing that drew me in long before I worked here was the idea that my effort here would help more people than it ever could buried in some forum. Now, it's fine if you personally find it just as fulfilling to help one person as it is to help a thousand. Or perhaps your motivation is the challenge in solving an especially hard problem... That's awesome too.
But whether or not the number of people who benefit from a post speaks to you personally, it's valuable for everyone to understand that the engine is designed to make content as reusable as possible, because it informs so much of how our system works...
See, once you realize that it's not just about the one asker, or the four voters, but rather the fifteen thousand searchers with the same problem... Well, suddenly, a whole ton of things that seem prickly and self-important, like editing out "Thanks in advance!" aren't about being "a bunch of power-happy pedants," they're about helping all the people who will ever have that problem to find the best answers. And find 'em instant-like.
Today (13 Jan 2017) the numbers and percentages of closed questions during 2016 were released for all Stack Exchange sites at 2016: a year in closing. GIS was the site with the 43rd highest percentage of closures out of 162 sites. This is high, but far from exceptionally so, especially considering that during 2016 we closed many old unanswered and poorly framed questions as part of a push for Improving on 19,000 unanswered questions?
If we try to eliminate that cleanup effort by using @Shog9's second set of stats in that Q&A which only looks at questions asked in 2016 and closed in 2016 then we see that GIS has the 63rd highest percentage of closures out of 163 sites, which places it much closer to the average of all SE sites.
That large number of unanswered questions says to me that we are probably placing too few questions On Hold. The On Hold status is often much more effective, and less consuming of volunteered resources, than copious comments to remind askers that getting an answer is rarely an "ask and forget" activity; often it is only the back and forth between askers and potential answerers that distills initial questions into something that is clear enough to be answered.
Today (19 Jan 2021) the numbers and percentages of closed questions during 2020 were released for all Stack Exchange sites at 2020: a year in closing. GIS was the site with the 15th highest number of questions asked and the 71st highest percentage of closures out of 175 sites.
Newer users may be confused by the distinction between On Hold and Closed questions in earlier years. Nowadays the two categories are considered as one and the On Hold status is no longer used. The only difference between Closed and On Hold was that a Closed question was classed as On Hold for the the first 5 days of its "closure" to try and convey that a Closed status is meant to be temporary and easily removed after a question is improved.
I too wonder if I am one of the 'nagging' ones...but really, I feel that the more information that the community has, the easier it is to provide a helpful answer to the asker. I didn't click on all of the questions referenced above, but the ones that I did, I didn't feel that I had enough information to spend the time formulating a response for. I have a limited amount of time a day that I can spend answering questions--I want that time to be spent answering questions that I know that I have the answer for, or at least a work around. If something is vague enough that I don't really know what is being asked, then I probe for more information, because by the time I am able to come back maybe the question has been edited with code or error information or something that has been tried and didn't work and the reason that way didn't work.
I feel that questions that don't have a lot of information in them end up becoming a back & forth process where the asker gets frustrated and the answerer gets frustrated and there is no benefit for anyone. As it has been pointed out above, we are all volunteers who do this for our own reasons--I have found SE to, by far, be the best community to find answers to questions. One of the reasons behind this is because I don't have to search through bad questions and bad answers to try to find what I need. It's also full of great people who are actually interested in helping others out. Because of how much I use SE in my daily life, and how helpful it has been, I give up a little of my time each week to make sure that I do my part to provide answers...but if I cannot understand what a question is asking, I cannot provide an answer, hence, why many of the above referenced questions are closed.
Just to add to what has been said: a reason why I am reluctant to vote for closing questions is that closing prevents others from posting answers. A question might get closed very fast, but it often takes more time to be re-opened. A recent case I observed: Calculating buffer distance for different groups of parallel lines in QGIS.
The question was closed shortly after it was posted. To be very clear: the question did have its weaknesses. However, I wanted to post an answer and another user outlined his own solution in the comments. The question was finally re-opened and now, there are no less than three answers, presenting different approaches.
So in this particular case, the users with answers waited the question to be re-opened and than answered it. In other cases however, I'm afraid that potential answers will be lost. Closed questions quickly get out of sight and don't attract the same level of attention when they are re-opened. And you don't prepare an answer, waiting for it to be re-opened - what might happen, or not.
So closing is always a balance of pushing the OP to improve the question (+) and blocking potential answers (-) that could be interesting to the whole community. I also read several times questions I would have closed at a first glance since to me, it seemed that it lacked clarity. However, I was surprised to see some rather good answers appearing that were accepted (thus met the expectations of the OP) and voted up (thus were considered useful by the community). So to others, the question seemed to be clearer than it was in my impression.
So I consider that sometimes it's not the worst idea to be (more) reluctant when closing questions.
