46

I wrote this question. Compare it to the first version, it's important.

The first edit was due to be close-voted as primarily opinion-based (5 downvotes, 3 close-votes in).

Seeing this, I checked the help section to know what to do. I didn't see anything in this case. I knew if I didn't get it fixed, I'd get something like "please rephrase the question". So I did it preemptively and focused on the real question, removing everything distracting.

After that edit, I'm blamed for having edited it, for having removed everything that wasn't fully and objectively answerable.

Minutes later, the question is closed for being opinion-based. (I don't know what in the new version earned me more close-votes. But that's not the issue here.) The warning on the question says:

If this question can be reworded to fit the rules in the help center, please edit your question.

I did just that.

So I don't understand other people's comment (that even was upvoted) blaming me for rewording the question when the very text on the closed-question warning tells me to!

Plus, unfortunately, there was a 1-minute gap between my edit and all three answers. And I'm even furthermore blamed for that. Like I should have known that three people would have answered at the same time I was editing my question to fix it.

To be honest, I'm lost in what I should and shouldn't have done. SO's software tells me to fix my question, some other people tell me I shouldn't.

So in trying to fix my question, what did I do right, and what did I do wrong? What should be my "lessons-learned" here?

15
  • 27
    After reading the comments, maybe you shouldn't lash out at people trying to help. Apr 4 '17 at 14:33
  • 4
    I didn't lash out: I presented facts to the first 3 comments. I didn't use complete sentence for that because I saw indeed the number of comments going up and felt urged to answer to all with such facts (and finding stuff on the internet is much slower than people looking at a question). Add the notifications for downvotes happening at the same time, I was a bit hurried in making my intent clear. Apr 4 '17 at 14:36
  • 12
    I'm not sure I agree with either version of your question being declared opinion-based. However, if I were inclined to agree with the close voters, then both versions of your questions are equally opinion-based, since the substance didn't really change. Apr 4 '17 at 14:36
  • 2
    @NicolBolas The original question was unclear, and people choose to interpret it as asking for an opinion, when it wasn't really clear what it was asking to begin with. Their interpretation ended up being wrong, it would seem.
    – Servy
    Apr 4 '17 at 14:46
  • 4
    I can't see how it was closed as POB. It isn't. I disagree with the IDE as this field is not a "value"-field, and I don't feel like I should capitalize is your opinion which may give the impression it's POB but that's about it. The edit also doesn't pose a different question either, It just removes the unnecessary parts. I do think you're going to struggle with that one user though.
    – Bugs
    Apr 4 '17 at 15:06
  • 3
    No comment is useful anymore. Can those be removed so that the question can live on its own instead of being poised by the previous version? Apr 4 '17 at 15:16
  • 4
    I'd use a custom comment flag on the first comment you want removed and explain why the whole thread needs to be deleted. NOTE: I find it helps if you go ahead and delete your own comments. There's a chance of the mod complaining that you can fix this yourself otherwise.
    – BSMP
    Apr 4 '17 at 15:18
  • 5
    I agree with the answers in this meta thread and did a reopen vote myself. That being said... I'm still not going to upvote the question, it don't particularly find it a good question as it is currently asked. The first thing I wonder when I read it is: are you aware that the spec is readily available for free?
    – Gimby
    Apr 4 '17 at 15:29
  • 2
    @Gimby Indeed. A simple ctrl+f on the specs would answer the question, making it a poor quality question.
    – Servy
    Apr 4 '17 at 15:30
  • 1
    @Gimby I should definitely adapt the question again to add nuance for it (because the quoted spec in the "big" answer isn't totally answering the question as it answer solely from the specs POV, which is good but not complete), but I'm so afraid now. I think this question should be written somewhere explicitly on the Internet and SO seems a good fit. Apr 4 '17 at 15:40
  • Whereas I agree that the question would better have been closed as unclear, I can see how it was closed as opinion-based: as posed (all versions), it is couched in terms requiring interpretation of the natural-language term "constant". Apr 4 '17 at 19:51
  • From skimming the question (pre- and post-edit) and the comments, the "point of confusion" (as far as I can see.. and I may be wrong) is that you appeared to be asking "are all final variables always constants [and is that spec. or convention]" (to which the answer is yes they are, in that Java won't let you change them, and that's the spec) but what I think you wanted to know is "is insisting/strongly encouraging that the names of all final variables/constants be capitalised part of the spec" to which the answer is no (it's just a convention that some/many IDEs follow). My 2c
    – TripeHound
    Apr 5 '17 at 14:08
  • 2
    @TripeHound No, bar some very small nuances, the question as it is now is what I wanted to ask. What you mention is an example of consequences. I wanted to clarify to show what I was speaking about but it only added confusion. But thank you for your input anyways! :) Apr 5 '17 at 14:12
  • 2
    I'm voting to close the reworded one anyway, because I can't figure out what its actually trying to ask. "constants at the spec level, or only in recommendation levels" makes no sense. Apr 5 '17 at 14:54
  • So many of us has been there and understand the feeling. Indeed, I would bet such scenario happen quite often and the actual course of action to follow isn't very well spread.
    – Maxime
    Apr 5 '17 at 19:37
48

The real problem with your original question was that it was unclear. You had a lot of information in your question that wasn't actually related to what you wanted to know about, and the question itself used rather imprecise wording, and ended up being quite ambiguous.

A bunch of people decided to just guess at what you were asking, rather than clarifying, and ended up posting answers without actually understanding what the question is asking (and also voting to close based on their interpretation of the question; they interpreted your question as asking for opinions, not facts, and voted to close accordingly). This has of course caused a world of problems, and is exactly why we try to close unclear questions as quickly as possible; we don't want people trying to answer unclear questions because in addition to not being useful, it makes it that much harder to improve the question effectively.

Editing the question to clarifying its meaning, removing information not related to your actual question and using more concrete wording of your question is of course appropriate.

16
  • the problem is that answers gven to the old version of the question now seem irrelevant and even plain wrong. Apr 4 '17 at 15:24
  • 44
    @SharonBenAsher That's because they are irrelevant and are just plain wrong. They have been from the moment they were posted. The improved question simply makes that more obvious to everyone involved.
    – Servy
    Apr 4 '17 at 15:25
  • but what is to be done with them now? Apr 4 '17 at 15:25
  • 17
    @SharonBenAsher The same thing you do with any answer that's irrelevant, you downvote, and hopefully the author realizes their mistake and deletes it. That happened. Success.
    – Servy
    Apr 4 '17 at 15:26
  • 37
    @SharonBenAsher Yes, they were wrong, because they misunderstood the question, and as a result provided an incorrect answer. Just because you misunderstand the question doesn't mean your answer can't be wrong; in fact, it means that it almost certainly is wrong.
    – Servy
    Apr 4 '17 at 15:27
  • 1
    I believe that in this specific case, where the clarification edit was a complete re-write of the text of the question, OP should have just opened a new one Apr 4 '17 at 15:27
  • 25
    @SharonBenAsher But it wasn't. The question is asking the same thing now that it was in the original revision. It was never asking anything else. You simply didn't read the question carefully. Now sure, it was poorly written, and that makes the misunderstanding a somewhat understandable mistake, but the fact remains that the question has been asking the same thing the entire time.
    – Servy
    Apr 4 '17 at 15:29
  • 12
    @SharonBenAsher it shouldn't have been a new question. Had the OP gone down that route people would have commented links to their previous question asking why they did such a thing and to not post duplicate questions.
    – Bugs
    Apr 4 '17 at 15:30
  • 1
    well, the close votes were casted before the complete re-write edit was published. so perhaps the accurate reason should have been "unclear what youre asking for" but the votes and closure were justified Apr 4 '17 at 15:32
  • 7
    @SharonBenAsher Had you voted to close as "unclear" that would indeed have been merited. I indicated as much in my answer here. Of course, the question then being edited to clarify its meaning as a result is the desirable consequence of that; it's the main goal of closing the question for that reason to begin with.
    – Servy
    Apr 4 '17 at 15:34
  • 2
    Yes and so was the edit @SharonBenAsher. When closed the OP has no choice but to edit to make it clearer. Those answers would have still been wrong and the edit would have still happened.
    – Bugs
    Apr 4 '17 at 15:35
  • 3
    Fine. I accept that. Apr 4 '17 at 15:36
  • 6
    @SharonBenAsher another point that might not have been noted so far is that unclear questions shouldn't be answered by guesswork, exactly because a subsequent clarification may render the guesswork irrelevant or wrong. When in doubt, one should use comments to coerce OP into clarifying their question, otherwise all bets are off. So I'd distinguish between "OP rewrites their clear question, invalidating existing answers" from "OP clarifies their unclear question, invalidating existing answers". Apr 5 '17 at 19:20
  • 3
    @AndrasDeak - That's the other problem with questions most users think are unclear: there will sometimes be other users who think the question is clear and aren't guessing but are simply reading it wrong. Or in this case, read the OP's intention correctly but are still the only one who thought it was clear.
    – BSMP
    Apr 6 '17 at 4:44
  • 2
    @BSMP And it's really a problem when they in fact read the question/intentions incorrectly, as tends to happen rather often with unclear questions, as a result of their lack of clarity.
    – Servy
    Apr 6 '17 at 13:11
21

As far as I can tell your edit didn't change the actual question (which wasn't even opinion based in the first version) and it gets rid of things that might have caused confusion for some readers, so I don't see any problem with that.

I have to say that I can't see the deleted answers (<10k - any screenshots are appreciated), but since the edit didn't change the question I'm guessing the answerers were guessing what your question was and ended up being wrong about it, which in the end shouldn't be your problem.

6

Posting poor questions has inherent dangers.

If they are hard to understand or ambiguous, people are going to answer something you did not intend to ask, and people are going to interpret it many ways, and some of those ways will justify close votes.

Perhaps they should have closed it as "unclear what you are asking", but honestly the exact close reason is usually not the key part. The key part is to attempt to prevent the flood of poor quality answers a poor quality question generates, give you time to revise, then (rarely and possibly) reopen the question when it can more reasonably be answered.

Once the poor quality answers (misunderstanding, answering questions that should not be asked on SO, etc) are up, harm has been done. The edit to bring your question up to snuff does additional harm (in that it makes the answers less relevant). Minimizing this harm, while making your question better quality, is hard.

Sucks to be the person who posted a bad question. If you start off in the wrong spot, sometimes all directions you can go suck. You can attempt to go down the direction that sucks least, but that direction may still suck.

In general, place your question front and center. Tell the story why you are asking the question "out of the way" if you think it adds value. A long, rambling story about some problem you had, then a question tangentially related to it, reads like "how can I solve my problem" not "what is the answer to this question".

Once you are in that hot mess, the question can be made better by either removing everything except the question, reordering is so that the question comes first and then you have a "story" appendix while possibly cleaning up that story.

To reduce the pain of the irrelevant answers, you could leave a short "I ask this because I had X problem; I think the answer to my question tells me if the IDE is following the recommendations or not."

5

I'm not saying I agree with the assessment of your question or the edit, but using the arguments of the users complaining in the comments:

  • The whole point of putting something on hold is so the user either edits the question to fix it* or it can eventually be removed if it isn't. It makes no sense to vote to close a question and also tell the user not to improve it.

  • Users should not be answering off-topic questions. I do agree with not invalidating existing answers but not when said answers shouldn't exist in the first place.

So either your question was off-topic and you were right to edit it or you shouldn't have invalidated existing answers on an on-topic question, but it can't be both.

*The comments indicate that some clarification is needed here: Fixing a question is not the same thing as writing an entirely new question. I am not suggesting that a question about RecyclerView in Android can be changed to a flex-box question just because it got put on hold.

5
  • It's not appropriate to completely re-write even a closed question into a completely different question. Yes, there will need to be some changes made to it; but a question that you just scrap and rewrite isn't appropriate, even if the question is closed. (That simply isn't what happened in this case.)
    – Servy
    Apr 4 '17 at 15:28
  • IMO, re-write of an opene question is not appropriate either Apr 4 '17 at 15:29
  • 13
    @SharonBenAsher: Any rewrite that is appropriate for a closed question is also appropriate for a question that hasn't been closed. Denying this leads to silly situations in which a question that needs edits must be closed, despite the author knowing what edits need to be made, only then edited, then processed through the Reopen queue. We don't need that kind of pointless bureaucracy. Apr 5 '17 at 0:30
  • @BSMP re "So either your question was off-topic and you were right to edit it or you shouldn't have invalidated existing answers on an on-topic question, but it can't be both." - Huh? IMHO, OP stated that there is a third possibility, which he believes (rightly or wrongly) applied: Some people misinterpreted what he was asking, hence their answers do not apply AND he edited the question so that such a misinterpretation would no longer occur. Right? Apr 6 '17 at 23:56
  • @ToolmakerSteve - At the time I wrote this answer the OP's question had been closed as opinion-based and one of the users who closed it then told the OP they couldn't edit it to fix it. That's what I'm arguing against in my answer. Those comments still exist on the question even though they're obsolete at this point.
    – BSMP
    Apr 7 '17 at 14:56

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/346440/my-question-is-being-close-voted-as-opinion-based-i-edit-it-before-the-5th-vote
meta.stackoverflow.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2022-05
186768
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:ZZBNE2YPXK4G7M743RYNXL5772FRFPTT
<urn:uuid:6892a237-2d8f-4cea-9327-1aa33c5738ff>
2022-01-20T16:36:18Z
151.101.129.69
text/html
sha1:RUGYHIQFIN3DXSXBKBY55GIHMBTRTCUR
<urn:uuid:f04ee05a-c363-4fe0-bbc6-d7c017b1b9d1>
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/346440/my-question-is-being-close-voted-as-opinion-based-i-edit-it-before-the-5th-vote
response
<urn:uuid:84da355c-209c-4028-acac-30af522e9512>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2022-05
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for January 2022
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-27
software: Apache Nutch 1.18 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.3-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: https://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/