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Currently these are our options for closing a question:

Current close vote reasons.

Every so often we get a question that isn't really a good fit for the site, only because there's information that we're not getting. This happens quite a bit with some of the medical questions, but also with some of the other questions. I've linked two that I remembered off the top of my head that I think would fit this close reason.

Currently, when we close these questions, we close them as either "unclear", or "too broad".

Unclear
This close reason doesn't really work in these cases because the question is clear. We know what they're asking, we're just missing some information that we would need before being able to answer the question. Closing these questions as unclear doesn't tell the user why we can't answer their question, it just makes them think that we don't understand them.

Too broad
This close reason fits better than "unclear", but I still don't think it really conveys what the problem is. It's not that there are too many answers, it's that without the information that's missing, we're just throwing out wild guesses.

I think that if we have a close reason for "Not Enough Information" then it will be more clear to users why their question is getting closed, leading them to edit their questions with the information, rather than going to someone else because they think we just don't understand their question.

Here's my suggestion for the close reason:

Not enough information
Please add more detailed information about the problem you are having and any steps you have already taken to try and resolve it. Currently, without the necessary information, answers to this question will be too vague or simply guesses.

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  • Related question about answers Custom Post notice Request – James Jenkins♦ Oct 6 '14 at 16:56
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    Kind of like no-repro on technical sites? (No-repro usually means "not enough info to reproduce the problem".) – Monica Cellio Oct 7 '14 at 21:20
  • @MonicaCellio Yeah, that sounds about right. – Spidercat Oct 7 '14 at 21:32
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I can see the motivation for this, but unless you left a comment citing the specific information that's lacking in the question, it wouldn't be that much more helpful than just using 'unclear what you're asking'. They'd know that some piece of information was missing, but not necessarily what.

I'm not flat-out opposed to this, but I'm having trouble reconciling what advantage this plus a comment has over just using unclear plus a comment. Using either, you still need to leave a comment that tells the person what piece of information is missing, and 'unclear' currently says:

Please clarify your specific problem or add additional details

(Emphasis mine)

Are you really sure we need this?

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  • I don't think the descriptions for unclear or too broad are helpful in these cases. The wiki page that the unclear reason links to definitely doesn't help. I started putting lists of the needed info on the meta post, but I don't think it's quite right to rely on users to leave comments, because I'm not going to leave comments on the days that I don't care. That's what I thought the close reasons were meant to fix. – Spidercat Oct 7 '14 at 21:52

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