My experience on other Stack Exchange sites with similar levels of subjectivity (namely The Workplace) is that people generally want to ask questions that are on topic.
People generally respond well to significant rewrites that capture the essence of the question. I have done this many times on Workplace and occasionally here, and when you leave a comment like, "I've made a large edit to your question to clarify it, if that changed your intent too much feel free to [edit] to clarify!" almost never receive a negative reaction.
The problem(s) areI'm demoralized from making edits here, because:
- I'm demoralized from making edits here, because itIt feels like no one really wants to reopen questions (this includes people who want to make the site more friendly - in fact people in this category are precisely the people who I think need to participate more in site moderation!)
- Many questions here cannot be rewritten this way given lack of information from OP
- Or are blatantly off topic, like the implementation questions
- Some level of "what are you trying to do and why" is required to rewrite a question
- It's a ton of work to make a comprehensive edit compared to VtC
- When you have limited time for community moderation, VtC >> comprehensive edits
Additionally, canned comments containing links are really not useful at all, especially since nearly all close reasons contain links to the same pages.
And last, related to overall morale:
- People here seem to prefer telling others what to do about how to make the site better than making edits, placing constructive comments, voting (reopen/upvote/etc) themselves, flagging comments which are "not constructive" or too direct towards new users (use the custom flag if it's a marginal one - trust me as a mod elsewhere, that helps immensely)
Any person here who wants to improve the site culture can do so. The problem is that it certainly feels like many (most?) people do not seem to want to do things themselves, but instead tell the others what to do.
It's hard to spend time finding the diamonds when you are shoveling the... crap. There are a lot of people who have the ability to vote to close/delete questions which are clearly offtopic. If everyone was actively doing this (such as all the implementation questions), I think the overall site community would improve as everyone would have more bandwidth to help edit broken questions.