Are (potentially) high view counts taken into consideration when deciding whether or not to unilaterally close questions? If not, what’s the deal ?

Question

I ask this question because, in my opinion, it is painfully telling (of what, I’m not sure, hence the question) about many of this site’s visitors and at least one of its registered voters when an insightful and thought-provoking question asking about “Stagnation de la langue après une évolution technique” gets fewer than 200 views (actually only 159 as of now) and gets unilaterally “close-voted” to boot (if you can call one vote “getting voted [on]”) for being “too broad,” whereas a question asking about “French equivalents of 'cost an arm and a leg'” gets more than 2K views (2,174 and counting) and not even that same lone vote to close.

Granted, the latter, “arm/leg,” question technically only asked “Are there more [examples]?” (requiring a simple, non-broad, yes/no answer) without expressly requesting to see other examples (although I imagine the many examples provided so far were welcome, if not expected, by its author), whereas the former, “stagnation,” question did go beyond simply asking, yes or no, if there were other examples by daring to come right out and express its author’s curiosity/desire to actually know what some of them were.
(However, I seriously doubt if simply editing the last paragraph of the former question to match the latter’s, yes/no “Are there more?” type of query would get it reopened, but maybe it’s worth a try.)

My only hesitation in writing/asking this stemmed from my fear that it would result in getting the latter question closed (which is not my intention, btw) for it has been my general experience in life that when people are called out for engaging in the seemingly inconsistent treatment of two parties, the initial reaction of many of them is to erase the consistency, not by kindly rethinking their most recent, adverse treatment of the latest party, but by harshly and retroactively reversing their inconsistent favorable treatment of the earlier party.

However, in some cases involving inconsistent/selective enforcement of rules, among which I am personally tempted to include this one, where such a reaction could easily be seen as a blatant attempt to cover something up (possibly the favorable treatment of questions with high view counts? Again, hence my question.), I can’t imagine that anyone (except perhaps D. Trump), from fear of perhaps calling attention to all the reasons behind the inconsistent treatment, would give more than fleeting consideration to such a course of action, which leads me now to fear less that the latter question will be unilaterally closed.
If, however, I’m wrong and it is closed, unilaterally or otherwise, I sincerely apologize, in advance, to its author for that sad and unintended outcome.

Answer 1

My theory in a nutshell: Feelew's question didn't have a clearly identifiable goal, and that unwritten principle of acceptable questions, for better or worse, tends to win out over the written rules.

To say it in more words, these are what I see as the relevant rules for asking SE questions:

1. Don't ask open-ended questions to which there is no one right answer.

2. Don't treat the site as a lookup service, like a dictionary or encyclopedia.

3. Demonstrate that you have a goal in asking your question.

There is both overlap and tension between these rules. Specifically, (1) and (2) ask fundamentally contrary things, and (1) and (3) appear to overlap. But I think the two questions you cite help tease out the differences and compromises. Also, I suspect that (3) is less often acknowledged.

Feelew's question violates (1) and (3). It looks like a straight request for data. Data can satisfy curiosity, but it's more fruitful when it proves or disproves a hypothesis. What is Feelew trying to learn from the answers? I suspect he has or can name a few good questions to investigate using those examples, but I don't know what they are.

The other question violates (1) and (2). It shows little original research. If there were a site where the author could enter "costs an arm and a leg" and get a list of (verifiably) high-quality translations into French, he would have used it, and troubled fewer people. But StackExchange is about people—tapping the wisdom of unexpected experts (or bibliographers)—rather than static resources.

The questions then are: Why did the second configuration "win" the SE game while the first "lost"; and should it have been this way?

I'll try to answer the second first. No: in my opinion, it should have been the other way round. The solicitation of good data from which insights might or might not arise seems to me more interesting than the search for equivalents to a single expression. The goal is clear in the latter case, but the criteria are inherently underspecified. Accepting an answer to that question actually risks producing the wrong impression. I would rather see volunteer researchers not coming to conclusions than volunteer translators short-circuiting the work everyone must do to really understand a language.

That is, of course, a cynical view, and I don't mean that "What's the equivalent?" questions are always unproductive; I've asked them too when I can't think of a good way to express something, even though I can produce literal translations. But a good answer to such a question should discuss the difficulties of the translation and how they can be resolved, and should ideally not be an unqualified list of options. It's hard to produce good answers and probably unsatisfying.

So why did the close votes go the way they did? I suspect because it's easier to see the immediate use of a question asking for a translation than examples that may or may not produce interesting questions. Moreover, most voters probably have the same question themselves. I certainly suspect that view counts and positive votes are correlated.

Of course, close votes come from established users, not random visitors. So they must somehow be in line with the goal of the site as the veterans understand it, and perhaps my view isn't aligned with that. After all, people come here primarily to solve problems. One of those questions seeks to do that by a much more direct route than the other.

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Jan. 18, 2018: Here's another of the many questions asked with no attempt at scholarship nor trace of effort on the part of the asker, with a query that could easily be resolved by an online service of high enough quality, and having no one right answer nor requiring any explanation of possible answers whatsoever. As usual, this question will be relatively active for the site and garner lots of views and answers of poor quality. But at least it has a clear goal and one that many users will probably also be curious about. Don't expect closure.

Answer 2

Closing questions has nothing to do with the number of views or the reputation of the asker. It's about whether the question is suitable for this site or not.

French equivalents of "cost an arm and a leg" asks how to express an idea in French. This is a perfectly reasonable question, and a very common type on this site.

Stagnation de la langue après une évolution technique asks for examples of an extremely common phenomenon. As it says in the help center under “What types of questions should I avoid asking?”:

To prevent your question from being flagged and possibly removed, avoid asking subjective questions where (…)

• every answer is equally valid: “What’s your favorite ______?”
• your answer is provided along with the question, and you expect more answers: “I use ______ for ______, what do you use?”

(…)

Constructive subjective questions:

• inspire answers that explain “why” and “how”
• tend to have long, not short, answers
• (…)

The question is a textbook example of a “list question”, i.e. a question that invites items rather than answers. It played out in a very predictable way: 6 answers were posted before the question was closed, and every single one of them just cites one example of the phenomenon. The “answers” do not answer the question, they are just citing examples. A good answer would strive to enumerate all the examples, or to explain how to construct or locate them, but this is impossible because the criteria are too broad and subjective. Stack Exchange is not suited for that kind of enumeration.

Granted, the latter, “arm/leg,” question technically only asked “Are there more [examples]?” (requiring a simple, non-broad, yes/no answer) without expressly requesting to see other examples (although I imagine the many examples provided so far were welcome, if not expected, by its author), whereas the former, “stagnation,” question did go beyond simply asking, yes or no, if there were other examples by daring to come right out and express its author’s curiosity/desire to actually know what some of them were. (However, I seriously doubt if simply editing the last paragraph of the former question to match the latter’s, yes/no “Are there more?” type of query would get it reopened, but maybe it’s worth a try.)

No. It's about what the question means, not the detail of how it's worded. The fact that both questions are worded as “are there examples of X” is not relevant. In one question, X has a small, clearly defined scope, which is perfectly fine for this site. In the other question, X has an extremely broad scope, inviting thousands of answers, which is not suitable for this site.

After a rather long-winded discussion which, frankly, reads more like an appeal to emotion rather than a reasoned argument, you state:

inconsistent/selective enforcement of rules, among which I am personally tempted to include this one

Uh, what? This is clearly not an example of selective enforcement since the question that should have been closed is closed and the question that should have been open is open.