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Right now it requires a 3000 reputation to cast a re-open vote.

I am not as concerned about closing votes as I think it should be a rare occurrence and we should lean towards helping people make their questions and answers better.

However, the fact that it only takes five people to close votes out of thousands of users, and only the rare few that have attained over 3000 reputation, does seem kind of unfair.

I also can see though how you wouldn't want people that are relatively new closing questions as they may not have enough experience yet.

But to re-open should be different and here's why.

If someone is a casual user or somebody who enjoys reading more than writing, their voice is completely squashed by this system. Someone might ask a good question, five people out of a small pool of the 3000 plus crowd vote to close it for whatever reason (and it might not be a good reason). And remember that pool is even smaller than you think because most people only read posts that they're interested in (I read Star Trek, and some Harry Potter, others may only look at Star Wars or a favorite author, etc.). And there's hundreds maybe even thousands of users that don't have 3000+ who would like to read and/or answer those questions, and they can't do anything about it.

I think we should lower the re-open reputations significantly. We should lower it to 500 or maybe 750 reputation. At that number the person is a real member of the community, has been participating, and should have their voice heard.

What is the process for doing something like this?

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  • The process is posting a feature request on meta, like you did. There's really not much more you could do about it. – Kevin♦ Jun 28 '15 at 16:50
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Right now it takes 3,000 reputation to cast a re-open or a close vote. We don't want "casual users" voting to close or open questions, we want users who are invested in the site and making it a better place all around. I know that some people have, in the past, suggested making account-age a substitute for reputation requirements, but it's always been shot down as it's not proof of investment or involvement. Reputation isn't a perfect measure, but it's about the best we've got.

As an example of this, my account on movies/tv is over three years old, and I've got 1500 rep there. Yet, I don't really know what their rules, policies, or norms are because I'm not invested over there. As such, I don't participate in much flagging, opting to leave it to people who are more involved in that particular site.

The thousands of sub-3,000-rep users who may wish to read or answer those questions do still have a voice that can be heard. They can leave comments, discuss in meta, or discuss it with us in chat.

Despite what you seem to think, most of us don't want to close lots of questions; we want to make sure the questions are within the scope of the site, and that they are good, and answerable. Closing a question is not a punishment or a personal issue on the part of the close-voters. We're all happy to help anyone get a question or answer into shape so that it can be left open/undeleted.

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    I agree wholeheartedly with this. – Valorum Jun 27 '15 at 20:47
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Privileges are common across the entire SE estate. If you feel that these should be changed, you need to raise it on SE:Meta, not on a local site.

For the record, there was a review a while ago. Some things changed, most things didn't.

Close votes policy review

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  • who did the review? – JMFB Jun 27 '15 at 20:29
  • Over 400 community members took part based on the upvotes and downvotes. – Valorum Jun 27 '15 at 20:36
  • IS there a link to this vote that I can see? Was everyone allowed to vote or only those with above 3000 reputation? – JMFB Jun 27 '15 at 20:40
  • YOu can see the thrust of the discussion here. The short answer is "ain't gonna change"... meta.stackexchange.com/questions/151833/… – Valorum Jun 27 '15 at 20:46
  • For something like this that needs serious justification it's really better to start on the per-site meta; if a user can't justify it on the site they know best, how could they possibly justify it on the whole network? – Kevin♦ Jun 28 '15 at 16:46
  • "Privileges are common across the entire SE estate." this is not exactly true. Or there is a difference between betas and "main" sites, e.g. on Worldbuilding, the close/reopen votes are available starting from 500 rep. – clem steredenn Jul 8 '15 at 10:35

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