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The Stack Exchange community strive for Q&A with perennial value. As such, a question that offers no searcheable textual characteristics is not worth it for Chinese Language.

Questions only offering an image to read or translate should be closed as off-topic:

Naturally, if the content of the image gets inserted as text inside the question, then it may be elligible for re-opening.

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    Yes, we're all on the same page. It was only after the blog post stackoverflow.blog/2018/04/26/… that we have started to let these questions ride a bit. Feel free to flag the older questions for closure. – Mou某♦ Jan 24 '19 at 8:35
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Self-help guide

This is why I whipped up this post: How do I self-answer "What does this say?" The aim is to close them as a duplicate, thereby redirecting the user to something they can use (if they choose to do so).

Some other in-passing observations:

Recent examples

Looking at two recent posts along these lines...

  1. What does this tattoo character mean?, November 1, 2019

    Closed last month by Tang Ho, user3306356♦.

  2. What does the lettering mean?, November 17, 2019

    Closed last month by droooze, Tang Ho, zyy, Flux, user3306356♦.

Some points:

  1. In a healthy site, we would be self-moderating and not using a diamond hammer for closures. (The second example above doesn't count as it's the 5-th close vote.)

  2. Since those two questions have upvoted answers, they won't be automatically deleted.

  3. It is peculiar to both answer the question (and upvote those answers) while simultaneously closing it as off-topic.

Dysfunctional reopen votes

I'd also like to highlight that, basically, reopen votes are useless at Chinese.SE, and reopening itself is virtually unused:

                 Action                  Moderators Community¹
---------------------------------------- ---------- ----------
Questions reopened                                2          0

2018: a year in moderation

Questions reopened                                3          0

2019: a year in moderation

So, while we might talk about reopening an edited question, it's basically not going to happen without a diamond moderator intervening, and even then it's very rare.

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  • Chinese SE community could choose to adopt the 3 votes for closing/re-opening like SO did. – Cœur Dec 27 '19 at 5:16
  • That's another matter entirely. I think it'd be more worthwhile encouraging and empowering users to participate in self-moderation. – Becky 李蓓♦ Dec 27 '19 at 5:17
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Yeah, I will say that as right, but you can just edit them. And someone will do at least something, like flagging (not really), editing, or downvoting.

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