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It seems that emacs.SE has one of the lowest percentages of closed questions, among all SE sites.

2022: a year in closing

Does that mean a greater number of questions aren't bad enough to be closed? Or does it mean that more should be closed? Why is emacs.SE an outlier in this respect?

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I think good (i.e., legitimate) questions should remain open forever. Whether a question has an answer or is followed up by the question OP, is irrelevant to whether the question might be useful on the site - for others, for example.

What really matters is whether the question is clear and appropriate for the site.

I don't know what it means for a question to be "uninteresting". Even if that were specified, I'd probably doubt that any automatic culling based on whatever that might mean is a good idea. Question quality is specified well enough, I think. Question "interestingness" isn't.

@Tyler's point about questions that are "too local" is a criterion about question quality. Question quality is independent of how long a question might have remained unanswered.

A question that was appropriate when posed could conceivably become no longer appropriate for the site - e.g., it might become outdated in some sense. But that's rare, and in any case it should be handled by simply closing or deleting it (manually), i.e., case by case.

My question here is about why we have a much lower percentage of closings.

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  • I meant "interesting" in the sense defined by stack overflow's automatic deletion protocol, I've added a link in my answer. There, 'interesting' is defined as having attracted enough views/votes/answers to indicate there's some value to it.
    – Tyler
    Commented Mar 7 at 20:00
  • I answered your question in the first paragraph: emacsSE is very reluctant to close low-quality questions compared to other sites. That's subjective of course, but I'm not sure you'll get an objective answer without active investigation of user/mod activities here vs elsewhere.
    – Tyler
    Commented Mar 7 at 20:03
  • Actually, the linked post doesn't use the word interesting at all, I did, which has confused my point
    – Tyler
    Commented Mar 7 at 20:10
  • StackOverflow isn't emacs.SE. ;-) Attracting "enough views/votes/answers" might indicate a degree of usefulness, but IMHO it shouldn't be a criterion for closing or deleting a question. Maybe with the exception of "too local", as you suggest. But even there I don't think there's a problem with leaving the question - it just may never get answered. Either a question satisfies the overall criteria of being allowable (Emacs-related, clear, etc.) or it doesn't. If it does, I'd say let it be. Just one opinion.
    – Drew
    Commented Mar 7 at 21:04
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I think emacs.SE has a more permissive approach to bad questions, i.e., questions that are poorly articulated or describe a local/unique problem, than other SE sites I'm familiar with.

Related discussion: What do we do with orphaned questions?

The single answer here, from a former mod, is that if I question could, with some editing, become useful, we should keep it just in case. I think that makes sense for a a limited period of time (days to weeks). But if a question has been here for months without improvement it should be closed/deleted.

I understand there's a process for automatically deleting low quality/low interest questions (i.e., https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/92006/158880), but it doesn't appear to be aggressive enough. Perhaps because view counts are inflated when people click on old questions out of curiosity (i.e., "why is this still here?").

My view is that increasing the judicious application of the 'too local' reason for closing questions would help here, but that's no longer an option.

A recent example that's clearly 'too local':

Magit `zz` (stash both) does not allow whitespace in minibuffer

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