Why was this question not closed/reopened?

Question

What influence did H.P. Lovecraft have on science fiction?

1. The main part of the question explicitly asks "can HPL be considered SciFi?"

2. The title was edited by Gilles to be ontopic, but it doesn't match ANYTHING in the body of the question

   Importantly, it ALSO doesn't match any of the answers provided (every answer that was written was an opinion about genre classification, NOT "influence").

Genre Classification / "Is this SciFi" is considered offtopic for SFF, so this question should be closed.

• Are questions whose answers would determine if a work could be categorized as sci-fi considered on-topic?
• What should be our Off-Topic reasons?

Please note that this Q was previously discussed on Meta, but the discussion amounted to "Keen explained that it should be closed and did so; then Gilles said that he edited it and re-opened unilaterally". This meta question I'm asking pertains to situation AFTER Gilles' edit - I feel that a combination of his edit (title only was fixed) and a mess of genre classification answers do not warrant re-opening.

P.S. IMHO, the question that Gilles wanted to ask, about influences, should be asked as a brand new question so it can be answered instead of languishing in a legacy question with 4 existing non-matching answers.

Answer 1

I edited the title to salvage this question in order to preserve the answers.

The question originally asked “Can Howard Phillips Lovecraft be considered a sci-fi author?”, which is purely a matter of opinion. We found early on in the history of this site that every single question of the form “is X science fiction” came down to two things:

• a definition of “science fiction”, usually one of the many alternatives listed on Wikipedia;
• a subjective decision by the author of the answer to pick one definition and make the work fit or not fit.

None of these questions led to interesting answers since you could pick a different definition and make your case for or against.

However, if we unask the question and posit that Lovecraft may or may not have been an SF author, we can study more objectively how his work relates to science fiction in general. Most of the answers to that question went along this track:

• “writers like Lovecraft are the genre's forefathers”
• “concept (…) that smacks of classic sf”, “Some of his later short stories ended up in Weird Tales, which had a heavier bias towards SF”
• “the heir to Lovecraft's horror was …”

As I wrote in my meta answer at the time: “I edited it to make it ostensibly not about defining the genre, but about Lovecraft's influence, which is what the answers mostly dwelt about anyway”.