Are we consistent when flagging questions as 'too broad'?

Question

Today a general question about vampires* was put on hold as 'too broad'. as no fictional universe was specified.

But we also have this question which is pretty recent, with 15 UV's and 2 favs about the specs of fangs in 'typical vampire lore'. It is a fascinating one really, but if 'vampire lore' is too board then it follows that a question about 'typical vampire lore' should be also characterized as such. And there is another one that looks like a market research of IKEA trying to find new clients among the undead with no discrimination whatsoever whether they are from D&D, True Blood or Dresden Files. I mean, there is no unambiguous answer to it, Spike from BTVS for example can fall asleep in any position and place, in a bathtub or on Buffy's bosom, and Undead Cedric from the Twilight saga apperenty never sleeps, but we can still learn a lot answering these questions and there are many users who are interested having them, some of these closed questions have 40+ upvotes.

So all this is a bit confusing. Say a new user drops in, (maybe he's even here as he found one of SFF 'general' vampire questions and decides it's the place to ask another one or even users who are familiar with SFF) how they are supposed to know why it is ok to ask a general question about fangs and sleeping patterns but not about the 'aging process' or 'bodily functions' of a vampire? There is no consensus in all these subjects in various vampire lores, so how should one guess which questions are allowed here?

Maybe I am being too naive, but shouldn't be there consistency in flagging questions to avoid confusion?

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• _{The same applies to tags 'werewolf', 'dragon','basilisk', 'zombie', and all the other creature tags. Except barlogs. They're fine.}

Answer 1

The vote on whether or not these questions are globally on topic or off topic is essentially a tie. (At this time, if I remove my votes on the two answers, for instance, it becomes a tie.)

In such a case, our only recourse as users is to use the privileges we've earned: upvote/downvote (or not), vote to close (or not), vote to reopen (or not).

This is a case where an actual exercise of community moderation, bottom-up policy, is going to prevail. That's opposed to a top-down policy of meta deciding how we're supposed to use our privileges.

So, voting will likely be inconsistent, as individual users with the combination of interest and privileges will vary. Just because someone votes a certain way on meta doesn't mean that they will ever actually take that review action. So, we should be guided instead by those who put their money where their mouth is.

Until/unless a global policy is truly decided, we need to make do with what we have. In this case, we also have the ability to raise a specific meta question about opening/closing a single question (as has always been the case) to draw community attention to something in need of moderation.

A similar question was recently brought up on Meta.SE, and the consensus there is largely the same as what I've stated here, albeit a little more succinctly eloquent:

Allow such questions to be voted on (including vote to close) as they present themselves to each user eligible to vote i.e. a case-by-case basis

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Of note here, is that if we look at how the community is moderating itself, these questions should be closed. That's how we've done it in the past. That's why none of the closed questions listed here: What's our policy on questions about fantasy/sci-fi creatures that aren't directly related to a specific on-topic work? have been reopened.

Answer 2

No, we aren't fully consistent with close-votes, especially on this kind of question.

Close-votes are always done manually rather than by the system, so there's always an element of human error. This is particularly true with questions of the type you're talking about - questions about general sci-fi/fantasy creatures or concepts which aren't specific to a single fictional universe - because these questions have been a point of contention for a while.

There was a meta post a few months back, What's our policy on questions about fantasy/sci-fi creatures that aren't directly related to a specific on-topic work?, which tried to nail down a clear community policy on questions of this kind. As you can see, the community is rather divided: 15 upvotes for "these questions should be on-topic" vs 14 for "these questions should be closed". With such a close race between two conflicting views and no clear consensus, we should of course abide by the status quo: leave these questions open unless they're blatantly opinion-based, unanswerable, or otherwise have no place on the site. The site's community-determined scope has never been defined so as to exclude questions which aren't universe-specific.

Unfortunately, not all of our close-voters are abiding by this. Questions such as What Bodily Functions Work in Vampires? and Aren't zombie outbreaks self defeating? and What Happens to Zombies that Don't Eat? and Why are vampires not rotten like other undead? which were posted back in 2011 or 2012, highly voted, and considered perfectly fine for this site for years have been closed in recent months for no apparent reason, despite there being no meta consensus supporting the closure of such questions. A glance at the list of close-voters on each question reveals many of the same names cropping up again and again: essentially there's a small clique of high-rep users voting to close these questions against community (non-)consensus.