consistency in voting to close

Question

I'm not sure if this is the appropriate place to raise this issue, but:

The stated purpose of the forum seems to be that the questions should benefit both undegraduates, graduate students and academicians.

A question about writing a cv for an internship was put on hold on vote because it was deemed off-topic and unhelpful to the rest of the community Preparing a curriculum vitae for an undergraduate internship

Fair enough. However similar questions about obtaining research jobs What options does college dropout with great grades, research projects and CV have to return to university (or thinktanks)? or getting into grad school without an undergrad Is it possible to be admitted to a Master's program after not completing Bachelor's degree due to academic dishonesty? seem to be accepted without question, or relevance to the stated purpose of the forum.

So my question is, what is the policy (if any) to ensure consistent moderation? It's not fair for some questions to get put on hold/deleted for being irrelevant when other equally irrelevant questions are allowed to stay up.

Answer 1

I would like to welcome you to AC.SE. I am sorry your initial contact has been so unpleasant. This is the right place to ask these type of meta questions about AC.SE. You could also use chat, although it is generally pretty quiet. Ideally when questions get put on hold, the voters will provide a little more information about why they are closing it.

Some people here feel anything undergrad related is off topic. I am not one of those. I think your question could have just as easily come from a grad student and hence be on topic. I haven't voted to reopen your question because I think it currently is too localized and the answers will only help you. There are also a lot of different questions that you are asking. A better, in my opinion, question, would ask about the theory of the different sections of the CV and not one so focused on your specifics skill set which no one else will have.

If you edit it to be more general, I will be happy to vote to reopen it. In the absence of an edit, I will think about it.

Answer 2

I changed the title of the question because the issue is not one of "moderation."

Stack Exchange sites are community-driven. Therefore, as much as possible, the moderators try to leave decisions to the general community. We will act unilaterally in clear-cut cases (abusive or spam posts, duplicates, completely off-topic questions such as programming questions, and so on). Otherwise, we prefer to wait until there's a consensus.

In this particular instance, the close votes were entirely from regular users; the moderators played no role in closing the question. Personally, I agree that the question you've cited should be reopened, and would support a reopening "campaign"; I've indicated this in the comments section. However, as I also pointed out above, the moderators here prefer to work from a consensus standpoint, so I'd rather if several users voted to reopen instead of acting unilaterally.

Answer 3

I agree with the previous answers, and there are just a couple of points I'd like to add.

If you look at the FAQ, the topic is for academics of all levels—from aspiring graduate and professional students to senior researchers—as well as anyone in or interested in research-related or research-adjacent fields, and as such, undergraduates questions are deemed relevant only when they are related to entering graduate studies or could be easily applied to questions related to graduate life. Hence, a question that benefits only undergraduates is not necessarily on-topic.

Secondly, I think any argument like "this question should be open/closed because this other question is open/closed" is not particularly constructive, since it's quite hard to compare questions and the reasons why they are closed or not. I've asked in the past for people to put comments when they vote to close, but unfortunately not everybody does (and in the case you point out, none of the closers left a comment to explain why they voted to close). It is possible that multiple reasons led this question to be closed, for instance, it's very specific (the OP listing his/her own skills), and looks like "help me do my CV" (which is off-topic) rather than "what is a good CV" (which could be on-topic, as aeismail pointed out). But I would be very careful in calling two questions "equally irrelevant".

Finally, this is a community site, so feel free to edit any on-hold question, that's why they are on-hold and not deleted yet. If you think a question should be open, then you have every right to launch a campaign to reopen it, even if it's not yours.