@JonEricson If it's not a bad question, then we should leave it open. Having a valid, closed questions on the site sends a really bad message to newcomers - that they have to get their question exactly right, or else it will be shit down.

@naught101 or it sends the message that you need to improve your quality and they get opened back up

@casey Why not just a comment to ask for clarification? If the clarification isn't made with in a few days (by the questioner or some other editor), and it's clear that it's not going to be improved, then close it, or put it on hold or what ever. Give people a chance. It's a crap feeling to ask a question and have it shut down really quickly, and it will turn some people away.

@naught101 that is precisely what closing a question does. I believe that was part of the reason the wording was changed at some point to "on hold" (it becomes "closed" after a few days). Also note that most close reasons post an auto-comment and in any case if you are casting a close vote, you should comment why. Also when the post is edited, it is automatically put in the reopen queue

We have about 50% completely-new-to-SE users and there will be some confusion as the the posting standards in the beginning. The proper thing to do is continue to enforce SE standards and people will catch on.

"if you are casting a close vote, you should comment why" - This is very important, and not mentioned enough. Suffice to say that I have some problems with the SE standards, and I'll be avoiding closing questions where ever possible. But fair enough if everyone else wants to. I'll bring it up on meta if it becomes a problem.

@naught101 The community is still very much in the formative stage. A common way for a site to fail to make it out of private beta is for many of the questions to be of the "idle curiosity" sort. Ideally questions that can be edited into better questions will be before they are closed. But for the sake of this community of (hopefully) experts, it's important to close questions that aren't very useful.

@naught101 It took me a long time, but I now believe that closing questions is what separates SE from, well, all the other Q&A sites where you are lucky to get your question answered.

I think Joel explains it in this video:

Hi folks. The "idle curiosity" question concern is exactly the reason behind my meta post of this morning, meta.earthscience.stackexchange.com/questions/34/… . Mea culpa in that I haven't asked anything yet, but...

@SimonW Please do start casting close votes on all questions that you don't want to see on the site. That's how we define the scope during the private beta (in addition to discussions on meta)

@JonEricson around? Just curious if you're the CM for our site, or if you're just interested in Earth Science.

@hichris123 Yes. ;-) (For the early part of the beta, we all look in on the site, but I'm going to be looking in more than most, I suspect.)

Ah, okay.

So... I'm spending my time answering/asking questions here while waiting for Meta Stack Exchange. :D

@hichris123 Don't tell anyone, but people on our team are already napping so that they will be prepared for problems later in wee hours of the night.

@JonEricson That's actually quite funny. Now, you should have just opened the gates to the dev tier, and we would have tested it for you. ;)

Like that would've happened :)