If a question is being closed, or has been closed as being unclear or lacking research, is it ethical to clarify and add substance to the question when your edit will make your answer plausible?
Example: What is the origin of "man on the spot"?
I'm tempted to edit this question in hopes of reopening it, but it may be too self-serving.
As the exchange between curiousdannii and ColleenV beneath the original question indicates, one area of controversy involves attempts to rescue questions that were closed—or are on the verge of being closed—on grounds that they do not show any signs of prior research effort by the poster.
A number of very active question reviewers on this site feel strongly that a question's lack of evident research effort should be an absolute bar to its being answered—that upon seeing such a question, a would-be answerer should not even consider whether it may be interesting and worth trying to answer: If it doesn't show research effort as originally posted it should be removed, period.
But other site participants will unhesitatingly embrace a potentially interesting question, regardless of whether the question's poster has satisfied the threshold research effort requirement. I'm one of those. To me, there aren't so many interesting questions at EL&U of a summer's day that I'm okay with automatically rejecting unresearched questions that might reward investigation.
I've never been a fan of the "closed for lack of research effort" rationale. I think that it exists as a close reason mainly because it offers a convenient way to deal with questions that don't quite fit into a demonstrable "closed as general reference" pigeonhole—either because the research required to find the answer involves a Google search (and there is a years-long dispute at this site over whether Google search results are equivalent to general-reference information, at least in some cases) or because the close-voter isn't sure where to find the answer but feels sure that it wouldn't be hard to do. Alternatively, it offers a simple way to filter out some of the many questions EL&U receives every day, without having to consider their merits more than superficially.
If we treat the close reason at face value, of course, once a question does show at least a modicum of research effort, the formal argument for closing for lack of research effort collapses. Any insistence that the showing of research must be done by the original poster is, to me, an acknowledgment that the "show research" requirement is in place simply as an excuse to reject questions mechanically, not as a way to ensure that they ask something at least moderately difficult to answer.
This came up only yesterday in connection with a question that, as asked, showed no research effort but that I nevertheless thought was interesting enough to be worth looking into. The question had already drawn one or two close votes before I posted the results of my research as an answer; and after I posted the answer, the question drew two more close votes—and a commenter admonished me that I "really shouldn't be answering such blatantly unresearched questions."
In an effort to save the question (and answer), I added a bit of previously uncited research to the question. As a result, the question now shows some research independent of the answer I posted. If the question had been submitted originally in its current form, I doubt that anyone would have claimed that it didn't show adequate prior research. But I daresay that some close voters may feel that by adding research to the question, I was cheating, and that the spirit of the requirement demands that the research be done before the question is posted and that it be done by the poster.
I can't agree. What matters is what is in the question—not who put it there. If a question is objectively improved by an editing alteration or addition, who or what is victimized thereby—the original poster, whose name is now associated with content he or she didn't write? That's what the rollback option is for. The integrity of a Q&A system that rests on the need for questions to persist in their state of primeval faultiness so that close-voters can remove them more efficiently? Then why does anyone other than the OP have the ability to edit the OP's question?
If an original question has little or no substance, its formal flaws are not worth addressing. But if, with a little effort, you can make the question useful to the site, it seems short-sighted to disqualify it on purely technical grounds. My advice is to look to the long-term value of a question and its answers, and to try to make promoting that long-term value your primary concern.
Questions can be edited by anyone because we expect the community to help out to improve questions. Therefore, if your edit improves the question, it is hard to argue that doing so is unethical.
Off-topic things usually cannot be edited into shape. However, sometimes it is possible. A question closed as "proofreading", where the OP is essentially uttering a concern about some grammar point, might be editable into a question about that grammar point. This type of edit is rarely possible, and should be attempted with care, because it's not always clear how to reformulate the question into an on-topic question while preserving the OP's intent. Maybe the sample sentence has an interesting use of auxilliaries but the OP was really worried about who vs whom and didn't explain themselves properly.
The question , er, in question, is an example of the latter case. The OP didn't give enough detail about what they are asking about and another user inferred it and filled it in. It's not obvious to me that the filled-in content is right or wrong. I'd consider this example borderline. One of the things missing from the OP's question is an example of the phrase in context. Probably the edit is referring the same sense of the phrase as the OP but I can't say for sure. However, intent being a part of ethics, I'd argue that this edit is acceptable until the OP shows up to speak for themselves.
If you have a good answer, I don't see any reason to disagree with reopening the question. As an asker of questions myself, I know the satisfaction of finding an answer.
If it is a poor answer however, it's probably best to leave the question alone.
