Indulging confusion

Question

There has been several questions recently that appear to be extreme example of confusion on the part of the poster about what they want to find out about.

• Buying tickets for travelling by train in Italy
• Schengen visa rejection for visitor visa - possible resolution?
• What food is Chicago (USA) famous for?

I do understand the rules of: Be tolerant, Be nice, Not everyone is a native English speaker.

But can we at least impose some requirement on the clarity of one's questions?

The unfortunate reality is that these questions do get upvoted even though they are not answerable or sometimes even comprehensible.

Answer 1

I see no point in imposing this extra requirements. This site has some democratic flavour. The users have several tools at their disposal

• Every user can vote for (+1) or against (-1) a question. It is true that the latter option is frowned upon by some influential users. However if we want to prune the list of questions, we should use it more consequently.

• Users with a high karma can vote to close a question.

• Every user can flag questions for moderation. Users with lower karma can use this facility to signal posts they would like to see closed. I imagine that if there are enough flags on one post, the moderators feel more comfortable to take the appropriate action.

As a corollary of this I would say that if a post has positive votes or even a positive balance it cannot be that bad or off the mark. The same is true for closing votes. If there are not enough of them, there must be a reason.