2

Every question lacking in research becomes closed by being flagged by the users in any community of Stack Exchange network; I am encountering this since I joined Stack Exchange network. But there's exception to this that in past, though there were some flaggable posts (lacking in research) on the English Language & Usage (EL&U), the moderators did not closed those posts. See the following screenshot: Screenshot of a post In addition to this, following are also the posts lacking in research (but were not closed):

What was the reason they were not flagged? Were the users not able to flag any post? or there were not any moderators?

4
  • 4
    All four examples that you provide links for were posted in 2010—approximately four years before "no [or inadequate] research shown" became a close reason at English Language & Usage. Whether site users (or moderators) should retroactively close questions from that earlier era, despite those questions' having drawn good answers in many instances, is an issue that site participants have debated repeatedly in recent years.
    – Sven Yargs
    Jan 4, 2019 at 8:59
  • 4
    What Sven said, plus: closing is a manual process involving collaboration among several individual human beings. You should expect variation, inconsistency, and oversights. It would not be difficult to find several questions asked within the least week that should be closed but aren’t, depending on when the Q was asked and who was around at the time, before it got pushed off the front page by newer questions. Don’t go looking for perfect consistency in closures, you won’t find it.
    – Dan Bron
    Jan 4, 2019 at 14:32
  • 1
    @SvenYargs It's probably worth noting that while 2010 was four years before "Please include the research..." it was only one year before "General Reference" was implemented and these questions were asked just months beforehand. The point stands that no research requirement existed either way, but the problem of English being an already very well documented language made itself evident very early on.
    – Tonepoet
    Jan 4, 2019 at 16:22
  • 4
    There was no ELL in 2010-12 either... EL&U was still in its infancy (we're now in 2019), it had to first build a user base and a repository. The same questions today, wouldn't last longer than a couple of hours.
    – Mari-Lou A
    Jan 4, 2019 at 18:01

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
4

Summarizing the comments, since they just expound at length on this:

The questions you're asking about predate the rule you're asking about by a significant margin.

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .