<p>I believe my vote to leave open / vote to reopen rates are rather higher than the norm on CV. I have also raised several majority "close"/"leave closed" votes on Meta where I disagreed strongly enough with the result. So in that sense I naturally sympathise with @gung's position.</p>

<p>Nevertheless, I do prefer a quick close to a drawn-out one. The cost of a slow close is that answers begin to appear before the question is sorted out. The process of editing and reopening a question is slow and laborious. The process of sorting out a question once answers have been posted, though, tends to be even more laborious and the threads that result are often poorer in quality (messier and harder for later readers to work through).</p>

<p>I think some of the substantive points of this question are, ironically, too broad! I have intended to raise several of them as standalone items in Meta threads of my own, if I get the chance. Let me just add some thoughts, currently rather unstructured.</p>

<p>I agree that <strong>self-study questions</strong> are often closed too early - if the OP has clearly made an honest attempt at the Q, it's silly and premature to close it just because the <code>[self-study]</code> is missing (but it happens). On the other hand if the OP has only made a <em>de minimis</em> attempt - or claims to have made an attempt but puts no details in the Q - I'd rather close it and give the OP time and space to edit it. This is partly because self-study Qs seem to attract Math SE style "fastest fingers in the West" answers, and once one of these has arrived the OP loses incentive to improve the Q. Moreover, if the OP shows their attempt, it often illustrates a mistake or misconception that is worth addressing in its own right. This is often how self-study questions add the most educational value. If the OP doesn't show their attempt, this is lost.</p>

<p>A related and possibly more serious (IMO) issue with self-study questions is we are very prone to closing as duplicates when two questions have similar mechanics to solve - but I think we often do it in a rather broad way, so that someone with the mathematical or statistical sophistication of the OP may be unable to translate the application of one question to another.</p>

<p>Incidentally, I think this is more serious because the close-edit-reopen cycle seems to be even less agile for duplicates. So <strong>closing as duplicate</strong> requires particularly careful consideration, both on self-study questions and others. <s>The page notice on questions closed as dupes doesn't seem to encourage OPs to edit if they feel what they really were trying to get at is distinguishable from the target.</s></p>

<p>There are quite a few close reasons that I think should usually (unless the question is beyond redemption and the OP does not seem to be acting in good faith) be accompanied with an explanation of what the close voter thinks needs to be changed for the question to be left open (and I'd extend this to reopen votes). I'd particularly say this for <strong>too broad</strong>, <strong>unclear what you're asking</strong> and <strong>self-study</strong>. In the review process I am sometimes saddened at lack of engagement with OPs, who must find the process rather mystifying and disappointing. It would help if more read the help pages and "how to ask a good question" guides first, of course, but some aspects of this site's culture are not immediately obvious from the help pages. This is especially true when standards have changed over time but OPs have seen grandfathered Qs and presumed a question in similar vein would still be acceptable.</p>

<p>I agree that some <strong>questions on programming</strong> are closed despite a statistical component. In some cases it is worthwhile doing so so that the OP has the chance to separate out the statistical and programming aspects of the question - for instance to make the coding part work on a more minimal reproducible example, which brings the Q more within the scope of our site and renders it more useful to future readers. On balance I think we are probably too aggressive closing questions that include code, or which discuss statistical programming practices but I can sympathise with the view that "there's nothing more boring than reading questions about software you don't know". Personally I think this is something that is worth a rehash of "what software issues should we consider on-topic here", which is a vexed question! (For my money - algorithm questions should almost always be on-topic though sometimes they are currently closed; I might stretch so far as to say package recommendations particularly for more complex tasks should be more welcome here, but I think I'd be a minority voice; I wouldn't want the site to become a repository of SPSS how-to tutorials. I think this is going beyond the scope of the current question though.)</p>

<p>I'd also add something about <strong>dataset request</strong> questions - for specific datasets they should clearly be off-topic but often people ask for datasets that are exemplars of certain statistical properties (but not caring so much what practical context the data are from), and yet their questions are often also being closed and they are being redirected to Open Data SE, which does not seem appropriate in my view (and has been discussed on Meta before).</p>
