Thank you for raising this important question. For the record, as far as I can tell the question has only been sent to the reopen queue 10 times not 11 times.
The simple answer is that it keeps entering the queue because it keeps receiving a reopen vote. We can prove this by looking at Shog's Meta post describing how questions can get sent to the reopen queue:
There are three ways a question can end up in Reopen Review:
A reopen vote is cast when there are no other active reopen votes on the question. Note that this allows for a single question to be enqueued multiple times, provided all votes age away before another one is cast.
A body edit is made within 5 days of the question being closed by someone who didn't vote to reopen. This allows for a single question to be enqueued multiple times, but only once for each time the question is closed.
The question gets popular, for a definition of "popular" based on votes and views. This can only trigger review once for the life of the question.
Since options 2 and 3 do not allow for the question to be repeatedly sent to the reopen queue, we can deduce that it must be option 1 at play in our situation.
As for the question of whether this is "an extreme breach of voting privileges", let's turn to Shog's Meta post explaining how the aging and recasting system works:
- Allow re-casting votes that've aged away after 14 days. That is, 14 days (use the same site-configurable value used in #1 here) after your vote has aged away, you're free to cast the same vote again.
If your first try doesn't get any attention, and you keep tripping over the same problematic question... You should get to have another go at getting it reviewed. A 14 day waiting period means you don't get to spam reviewers with every question you personally don't like, but does give you that opportunity to correct oversights without abusing flags for the purpose.
According to this, a question can theoretically re-enter the queue every 14 days. As stated there this is specifically designed to allow users to send the same question to the queue multiple times, and the 14 day waiting period prevents users from spamming reviewers. There is no specific mention of whether there is a limit to how many times this procedure can/should be used. So far the system seems to have allowed it.
That takes care of the technical discussion. Now for the discussion about this particular example:
To my mind the interesting thing here is that though the question has been through the reopen queue 10 times, has been mentioned as incorrectly closed in two separate Meta posts, has an answer constructed from factual statements in the very book series that the question asks about, has a comment to the question pointing this out, was the subject of a discussion in Chat, and now has a new Meta post about it, I cannot find a single word from any close/leave closed voters explaining why the question fits the Primarily Opinion-Based close reason. Surely, if voters see the same question coming up again and again and are annoyed by this the simple thing to do would be to explain how the question fits the close reason.
As the only answer (positive scoring) to the first of those two Meta posts states:
If a question has been closed incorrectly, then the answer is simple: reopen votes! And if that fails, you can post to meta asking why a specific question is seen to be against community norms. With luck, you may get a response from the close-voters, and with even more luck, either you or they may inspire a change of mind in the other.
So far it looks like the first two of those things have occurred, but the latter two have not.
Now as I pointed out in the aforementioned Chat discussion, a full half of the leave closed votes from the totality of trips to the reopen queue have come from the same four users reviewing the question again and again. It's no secret that there are a handful of reviewers who try to take part in every review they can get their hands on, and that is not necessarily a bad thing. Indeed, they are perhaps to be commended for their devotion to the upkeep of this site. However, it can sometimes lead to the question not getting seen by as diverse of a group of users. As noted in the question post here, the last eight reviews have unanimously decided to leave the question closed. Yet since this Meta question was posted (and presumably other users saw it), the original question has been reopened twice (i.e. 10 distinct individuals voted to reopen it). The decision to leave the question closed was apparently not as unanimous as the reviews make it seem.
There is an additional important lesson that can be derived from this case. We often have discussions about questions where some users think that there won't be information in the existing material to answer the question and the question should therefore be closed, while other users think that such questions should remain open. A common argument advanced by the former category is that if the question is closed and someone has a factual answer, the question can simply be reopened. To quote a comment from the most recent iteration of this:
I'm reasonably sure there's no canon answer. If I'm wrong, you can always ping me and the question can be reopened with trivial ease
Surely 10 failed trips to the reopen queue has passed the point of "trivial ease". How can we expect voters to reopen a question based on a user claiming that he/she has information from the books (or other material) that address the question, when they don't even reopen a question that already contains such an answer?
This again shows why it is so important that questions where people think we don't know the answer not be closed. This is just the latest example where users have thought that there is no information in existing materials with which to answer the question, even though there is such material (as demonstrated by the existence of the answer). Of course, it is entirely possible that the answer is incorrect. Full disclosure: it's my answer and I make no claim that my answers have more authority than any other answers; it is certainly possible for me to miss some information, or to misunderstand something, and therefore construct an incorrect answer. However, that is precisely why these questions need to remain open. The answers need to be posted so that the community can determine – via voting – whether the answers are good or not. We cannot have a situation where the correctness of potential answers is being determined by a group of gatekeepers preventing the answers from being posted. (In this particular case the answer currently has a fairly decent score for a not-very-highly-voted question.)
So in sum, I don't believe it is a problem that the question has been repeatedly sent to the reopen queue. If there is a problem here, I think that it would be that reviewers have repeatedly voted to leave closed a question as Primarily Opinion-Based – despite the question containing a fact-based answer – without ever explaining why.
