... On the second, I support the motive behind the change in wording. Even if we (as askers) find nothing or didn't know where to start looking, the question should give at least an inkling of the asker's context. That's what I think fulfilling the 'research' requirement really does - it tells readers what to expect of the asker's domain knowledge and why, based on that knowledge, the asker is still puzzled.

@Tonepoet I don't think any of the canned reasons is prescriptive - just because a question fits one of them doesn't mean that they must be applied. I've argued, for example, that even opinion-based answers are acceptable if they are sufficiently supported. That, of course, implies that some opinion-based questions should be allowed to remain open. ...

... I think the research issue is similar. As you say, the canned reason is available for the community to explain why it closed a question; there's nothing that requires the community to use it if mitigating factors are present.

@Lawrence Oh I remember that question. I was going to answer it until it was migrated...

@Tonepoet Closing a question doesn't penalise in that way - that's what deletion (often, but not always) does. I agree that research in the sense of 'showing your homework' should be mandatory. Even if the digging turned up nothing, showing where they (we) dug can be helpful.

@Tonepoet Apologies for the delay in continuing my end of the chat.

@Lawrence There's no reason to apologize. We're not in a rush, are we?

@Lawrence That's why there's good subjective in good subjective, bad subjective. People tend to forget that questions should only be closed once they're primarily opinion based, which is when any number of equally valid answers can be given without corroboration. That is to say "What's the best word?" is a P.O.B. question...

The actual amount of corroboration we require at Stack Exchange is really quite minimal. Even personal antedotes count if they're based upon sufficiently relevant personal experience or expertise, and in our case dialectical questions can be corraborated with a statement as simple as "I'm an American/Canadian/Scot/Briton/Australian and we use the word blah to mean blah blah blah" with the assumption that a native born speaker immersed in the language is very experienced with their own tongue.