I have seen many questions that have been put on-hold or closed with the message:
"This question is missing context or other details: Please improve the question by providing additional context, which ideally includes your thoughts on the problem and any attempts you have made to solve it. This information helps others identify where you have difficulties and helps them write answers appropriate to your experience level."
This links to the meta post "How to ask a good question." This post seems to be a great guide for new users and older users alike to make their questions more valuable to the community. This seems to be a trove of wisdom, but
Is it the standing policy of this community to allow a question only if they meet every single one of these requirements?
Aren't there questions that don't meet every single point of that post to the letter that are still of value to this community?
I didn't become active on this site until relatively recently, and when I joined and began asking questions I read the Help Center page "What topics can I ask about here?". This page also redirects back the the post about asking "good questions", which I read and try to abide by. But the Help Center does not say that questions are only allowed if they meet the guidelines of that post. Instead, it gives different requirements.
Recently I've been frustrated by posts that I have wanted to answer, but have been placed on-hold or closed because they did not meet the "good questions" guidelines perfectly, but they did meet the requirements defined in the Help Center. Many of these questions were good, interesting questions that I wanted to answer.
I understand that the issue of PSQ's has been raging since way before my time, but is it community policy to put on-hold/close questions that don't meet the requirements of the "good answer" post? If it is, why doesn't the Help Center say this? It seems to be enforced by a small number of mods and users with high reputation arbitrarily and capriciously.
Recent example: Question
This question was asked by a new user and is similar in nature to other questions with the tag "automata" or "formal-languages". Questions like this in these tags typically get quality answers. However, the question was quickly put on hold for lack of context. When another user edited the question to clarify a definition (which was clear to most users of the tag, but maybe not to the users who voted to close), the edit was rolled back.
The question, while not providing motivation or the poster's work, still gives plenty of context to make it answerable. The question is not a groundbreaking question, but it is certainly of interest and might be answered in a neat way and be of benefit to others. I don't know if the poster will edit the question or choose not to. I don't know if the poster has given up and will never look at the question again. But either way I think multiple users would like to answer it and it would be of value to the community and future users.
I flagged it for moderator attention (as this page explicitly tells me to do if a moderator voted to close), but I was told that the flag was not the appropriate action, and to ask on meta or C.R.U.D.E. (which I only recently learned about).