<p>This is also a question that has concerned me, at least sufficiently that I try to put a comment explaining my suggested next step — especially if I am the final person to vote to close a question, and the question seems in good faith but where the poster is likely unfamiliar with SE procedures in general or CV in particular. My recommendation is often to edit and refocus if I feel the question can be salvaged, or to ask the question on another site if an alternative SE would be a better fit (we can migrate to some other sites on the network as part of the closing vote, but not all). Quite often there's also an <a href="https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/66377/what-is-the-xy-problem">X/Y problem</a> and my suggestion is to have a serious rethink before editing or re-asking. I might point in the direction of some similar questions which I think might be relevant, and may even solve the underlying problem, without being duplicates of what was actually asked.</p>
<p>As the above paragraph might suggest, I would like to somewhat challenge the framing of this Meta CV question. <strong>Sometimes we don't, in fact, want to encourage new users to edit their closed posts.</strong> A case that I'm never sure how to best deal with is when a poster asks a question that's both close-worthy from our point of view, and mis-specified from their point of view (they haven't asked the question they really meant or needed to ask, due to a faulty assumption or the X/Y problem). By the time the question's closed, it may already have answers, which will become irrelevant or confusing to future readers if the question is substantially edited and reopened. This highlights how <strong>it's important to close poor questions early, before answers come in — and one of the drawbacks of expecting reviewers to provide substantial personalised feedback is that this slows down reviewing</strong>, while discouraging experienced users with 5 minutes to spare from checking out the review queue.</p>
<p>On balance, I share many of the concerns raised by this Meta post. I have seen salvageable and potentially interesting questions that just fizzle out after closure without reviewer feedback. I don't want to blame reviewers in any way for not leaving feedback — it's unpaid work after all (free labour granted to a for-profit corporation, no less!), certainly the OP has no &quot;right&quot; to feedback just as they have no &quot;right&quot; to an answer, and the reasons that appear on the close notice are usually informative enough. Nevertheless, OPs seldom seem to act on them in the absence of feedback. Sometimes this will be due to &quot;drive-by&quot; question-askers, who may not have acted on extra feedback anyway. <strong>One factor in reviewers deciding how much effort to give in terms of feedback and encouragement, is their perceived likelihood of the OP being drive-by</strong>: after years of reviewing you do get a decent sense of this. So you'd have to be careful about reading too much in to rates of OP editing and improving questions in cases with and without reviewer comments. Similarly, even if you restrict yourself to cases where OPs do make edits, I suspect you'd find the biggest quality improvements come in cases where reviewers leave useful and specific feedback that goes beyond the generic message on the close notice, but again reviewers will generally only leave such feedback in cases where substantial improvement seems possible!</p>
<p>With that in mind, the problem might be less severe than it first seems, but also rather hard to perform a valid statistical analysis on. Are there any actionable responses we could take anyway? I have a few suggestions intuitively, several of which might be suitable for A/B testing if someone at SE wanted a more data-driven approach. These are mostly technical suggestions because I think other answers have explained why you're unlikely to achieve the change you want via a policy or attempt at enforcing a new social norm in favour of reviewers giving more detailed feedback (and I say that as someone who often gives it).</p>
<p><strong>Are there ways to make providing additional feedback easier for reviewers?</strong></p>
<ul>
<li>We have a <strong>Meta list of canned responses to copy/paste</strong> that often <a href="https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2468/how-best-to-leave-comments-on-questions-and-answers-in-the-review-queue">provides more detail than the reasons given in the close notice</a>. <strong>Could we promote this list more</strong>, so more reviewers are aware of it? (This is something CV might be able to do for itself, the other suggestions I think only work if there was buy-in from SE itself, which means they are really better-suited to SE Meta than CV Meta.)</li>
<li>As an extension of the above, <strong>would reviewers benefit from drop-down commenting tools for common responses?</strong> This might be a useful addition to the Review Queue itself. I believe there are/were browser extensions for SE sites that serve a similar purpose.</li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Is the close notice too daunting or confusing for posters?</strong></p>
<p>Generally they explain the reason for closure quite adequately, and they do suggest editing and improving so the question can be reopened. Nevertheless,</p>
<ul>
<li>we could try <strong>cutting down the verbiage</strong> so the notice is less intimidating,</li>
<li>we could try <strong>rewording to emphasise the editing/improvement</strong> angle more clearly,</li>
<li>we could try <strong>giving a less intimidating and less final-sounding name, e.g. &quot;on hold&quot; instead of &quot;closed&quot;</strong>,</li>
<li>even though it's basically duplicating info that's in the close notice already, we could try <strong>having a bot comment to suggest editing and improving</strong>. I like this suggestion enough to think it might be worth trying, since people sometimes do respond to redundant information, but it does come with risks e.g. OPs responding to the bot in the comment in the hope of drawing assistance but getting no reply.</li>
<li>even more radically, <strong>should we distinguish between questions that look salvageable and those that aren't?</strong> There are some which fall so far below our quality standards, or so far outside our scope, that encouraging the OP to edit seems wasteful. I can see some benefits to having a <strong>checkbox in the close-voting menu to say the post looks salvageable, and the OP should receive feedback encouraging them to edit</strong> (whether that's via a reworded &quot;on hold&quot; notice rather than the normal &quot;closed&quot; — something which might be visible to the OP but not other readers on the site — or the bot comment suggestion, or some other method else entirely).</li>
</ul>
