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This is a follow-up from this posting on Meta Programmers, where there is a discussion about how to handle highly voted, but closed questions.

There are a number of closed questions on Programmers (and I'm sure on other sites, too) that are really close to being good. However, in their present state, they aren't good - they are too subjective, too localized, or just not useful in their current state. However, they can be cleaned up and made into really good questions.

In the post I linked to, I not only picked out one of these questions from Programmers, but also outlined how I would make it better. It's definitely in the same spirit as the original question, but also far more useful. If I were to simply rewrite the original question, most (if not all) of the already provided answers would be invalid or just not make sense.

Currently, the only option for such a massive "reboot" of a question are for it to be reasked, either by someone else or the original asker. If the original asker fixes it, then it would invalidate answers and be up to the answerers to fix their answers or delete them. If the original asker reasks the question as a new question, they get double reputation, unless the original is deleted. If someone else asks the question in the improved manner, they get reputation for a question that isn't theirs, and the original asker gets rep for their "bad" question.

I think that diamond moderators should have the ability to reboot a question. That is, they edit the question and get edit credit, but all existing answers are removed and reputation gained for answers and the question is reset. The question is returned to the front page, like it was just asked. This could also be expanded to allow 10k+ users to vote for a reboot, proposing new wordings as well as a reopen.

Thoughts, problems?

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devs can reassign post ownership to arbitrary users. This is not a diamond mod ability however. –  Jeff Atwood Aug 4 '11 at 10:58
@Jeff I wouldn't want to reassign ownership. For example, in the question I linked to on Programmers, I would want any rep to go to the person who originally asked the question. If I rewrote it, it's still their question. I just made it appropriate to Programmers. –  Thomas Owens Aug 4 '11 at 10:59
correct, so you could re-ask (and if you were a dev) reassign ownership to the person who originally asked the question, etc etc –  Jeff Atwood Aug 4 '11 at 11:01

1 Answer 1

One solution to this could be to make the edit in conjunction with a moderator.

If a question has been identified as salvageable, albeit with major edits, then after the edits have been posted the answers would need to be reviewed to see if they were still applicable. Those that weren't could be deleted by a moderator.

Having just re-read the above (and Jeff's comments) it might be simpler just to reask the question yourself.

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