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'Executive summary' of the following answer:
The key aim of reading questions is to help the asker
Voting to close is thus (usually) something to do after comments or similar to improve questions have failed
Rapid closing is ideally aimed at clear cases such as questioner agreeing, spam, massively off-topic, etc.
Minimal working examples (MWEs) are a useful ...
27
Such a feature has been discussed before on the big meta (How Do I Opt Out of Privileges?). It has been rejected, with a very simple reason: Nobody (i.e., not even the casual voters) should vote for duplicating unless they are 100% sure it is the correct action.
If you are not sure, you should simply comment, not vote to close, and see where it goes.
27
There are a few things to say here. First off, the StackExchange 'back end' works in the same way for all sites, which means that 'we' (TeX-SX) have to use the structures as decided on by the 'Powers'. Occasionally that means we have some oddities. That leads to the second point: 'off topic' is (currently) intended not only to cover questions which are out-...
27
do mark the question as a duplicate. but don't remove your answer. although the answer may be essentially the same as the one for the question identified as a duplicate, someone coming to the site in the future may find this question first,
and the fact that the answer is there may save that person from an additional
step in finding an answer.
(on the ...
26
One I think uncontroversial close reason is for things which are typos or which cannot be reproduced: these are about TeX but are unlikely to help any future readers. Thus something like
This question was caused by a problem that can no longer be reproduced or
a simple typographical error. While similar questions may be on-topic
here, this one was ...
20
I frequently do this. The two decisions are almost completely independent for me. The only time that the presence of the duplicate would mean that I didn't vote would be if the original question was blatantly easy to find (something like the "How do I look up a symbol?"). If someone's put some effort into their question, they probably did a cursory search ...
19
I just have answered Magazine template? because is not a technical question, but it is clear and specific. He do not ask how to make a magazine. He asks if there's anything out there to not make it from scratch. This might be answered narrowly with a "No, sorry", "Sure, go here and there" or "Well, more or less. Look at this and that, and so you get the ...
18
It's not a problem. If there would be upvoted answers, the question would not be unanswered and would go away from the "unanswered" list.
No need to close, what would actually prevent further, possibly even better, answers.
See on the main meta site: Would it be possible to have a “community accepted” feature?
You can show your acceptance of an answer by ...
17
As we have seen from the comments, every detail leads to another full blown discussion and I am not the TeX-SX correspondant so I'll try to be a user again.
Because there is user involvement that might lead to confrontation and since we are extremely avoiding it, I have to be very careful with the sentences I am using. Otherwise it starts to get dissected ...
15
The status-declined tag for Can we have the ability to rescind a close vote before it closes? was... rescinded. It was updated to status-planned on June 10, 2013 and subsequently implemented on July 21, 2013, turning it into status-completed.
Users are now able to "undo" their close-votes in a similar way that one can retract/modify your regular vote to a ...
14
In this case, the post shouldn't be closed first.
As @cfr explained in comment, the OP can have the problem and not knowing why this doesn't work for him/her.
Sometimes the error is a old TeX system and updating it to a current version is the best way to solve the problem.
Sometimes the MWE first provided by the OP didn't show the proper behavior: the OP ...
14
Let's review the complete original question to see of there's any reason to close it.
Title: "Just reducing the f***ing huge space before the first line"
This is obscene language. Sean later took the time to clean it.
Question text: "Please help me to make the rest of my life better, found nothing here..."
This is not a question.
Code: was added without ...
14
Yes, after four days, provided the question has received enough views.
See Close Votes expire too soon for low-traffic tags
14
In general, the site is intended to work as a community, so using your votes is the preferred way to push for closing. Flagging is best used for things that really need moderator attention, which is more likely to be true for older questions which might not attract other people's interest than for very recent posts that will (probably) get other close votes.
...
12
I think the other answers have addressed the reasons for voting to close. I would like to discuss the timing of it.
There have been a couple of questions that have been closed recently that I don't think should have been closed. In both cases, it seemed that one person cast a vote to close almost as a 'knee jerk reaction'. Some people may not know that as ...
12
I have simultaneously upvoted and voted to close questions on a few occasions, but I only did so when the duplicate question was either exceptionally well-stated or when it turned out that the matching original question was hard to discover, usually because of improper tags.
12
Some questions are straightforward duplicates and there's no point in waiting the OP to confirm it: see for example https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/149747/include-endlstlisting-inside-lstlisting-block which is a duplicate of Masking \end{lstlisting}
Other cases are not so straightforward and I endorse the idea of giving some grace time for the OP to ...
10
Based on some discussion in chat and looking at the comments on the answer by dcmst it seems clear that the question isn't a dupe but that the question also wasn't all that clear. I've therefore edited the question to try to make it clearer and also removed the duplicate mark. (I've also added a second answer, but that's a different aspect!)
10
Close as off-topic (with the motivation "the problem is due to an outdated package or distribution) is the current policy, mostly for lack of better reasons.
On the other hand, the net is full of outdated examples and templates (even in the LaTeX related Wikibooks pages); it would be impossible for us to cope with all of them, maintaining information ...
10
I'm against such a rule, because it doesn't bring anything significantly positive, at least not on TeX.SX.
In many cases the question is resolved in comment, as was pointed out by Joseph, and OP is completely aware that the question is getting closed as dupe or OT, understanding the reasons. In other cases, the question is simply off-topic with now doubt ...
10
In my opinion, as long as a question is searchable in its current form, and there is a chance that another user searches for the question, it is not too localised. Localised are questions that end up being typos, missed braces or dollar signs, that are solved in the comments.
If a question is about a "rectangle", but the "rectangle" being irrelevant, it ...
10
My preference is for creating questions that tackle the same issue but are asked in a cleaner and slightly more general form and then closing the old trivial question in favour of the better trivial question. I don't think "triviality" is such a big issue, if we can pin down questions of the same sort.
I'm not a Tikz person, but I guess a question along ...
9
There is a difference between "not acting on a close vote" and voting to "Leave Open" a question. Not acting (or choosing "Skip")
removes the post in question from your review list, while voting to "Leave Open" has an impact on the review list displayed for other users (read further).
You are able to view the previously reviewed close-votes by clicking on ...
9
This is a common concern with the community: Why are certain questions closed as duplicates of others when they ask for different things. It's simple: The answer to both questions lead to the same answer.
But wait... the question is closed as a duplicate of another question, which is completely wrong when the questions don't ask for the same thing. Right? ...
9
Option 1
From the perspective of the community, the Stack Exchange system (or interface) allows for correcting this:
Cast enough re-open votes to remove any closure statements from the post.
Re-cast close-votes using the appropriate duplicate.
I would further suggest that the process could be sped up when collaborating with the folks in chat. There are ...
7
The reasons you note that is absent in the choices for voting to close a question as off-topic stems from the original close-voter using the "Other (add a comment explaining what is wrong)" choice and writing an appropriate comment.
You'll note that there is no mention within the closure notification added to a question other than it's off-topic. Consider ...
7
This appears to be normal procedure and no special powers were needed in this case. https://tex.stackexchange.com/help/duplicates says
The original question generally must have an answer; questions may only be marked as duplicates of unanswered questions on meta sites, when the questions share the same author, or when closed by a moderator.
Presumably ...
6
Voting to close is considered a privilege which is attained at 3,000 reputation. Before this milestone, your only option to initiate this would be to flag a question for moderator attention and requestion closure (another privilege requiring only 15 reputation):
(Note that you may not see the close option in the above image.)
The above is the appropriate ...
6
I think it would be great to have these migration paths. Another helpful migration target would be Super User, for questions that don’t involve *TeX after all. We get these questions occasionally; some of them were simply asked on the wrong site, others are just more likely to get a helpful solution when widening the scope of possible tools beyond *TeX.
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible
