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Yesterday, I posted a question. The question was misunderstood.

"It was very confusing. What on Earth did you want?

It was a word-request question. I needed a word (or phrase, or expression) to name/describe the situation a development team was in. I received a couple of good answers (like this one, very on-point) and a lot of analysis (why are you in this situation) and advices (how to solve it). These were really great (e.g. this one), and I was grateful, but it was not the point of the question.

Since I'm still a "noob" in these matters of asking questions, I made a dozen edits trying to define the kind of answer I was looking for, with moderate success.

"Ok, so what?"

Today, I've woken up to the question being on hold for being "opinion based". I think there can be motives for it being closed, or migrated to https://english.stackexchange.com/ , but I'm confused why it was declared "opinion based", of all things.

I would also like some help or advice to improve it, if you think it can be made to be a valuable on-topic not-opinion-based question.

"Word-request are more of an english.SE think, aren't they?"

I didn't post it in https://english.stackexchange.com/ because I felt that it required knowledge of the specific field, and sice I saw a "development-methodology" tag, I thought that asking the name of this kind of situation would be on-topic. If the mods think I made a mistake here, I would be ok with the question being migrated.

NOTE:

I also want to apologize to all the people my question misled, who made great answers and/or comments, but weren't what I was looking for.


EDIT: It has been suggested that this may be a duplicate of On the troubles of naming and terminology . I think that question is related and contains valuable information, but I think my question is different because it asks for a re-evaluation of a specific case aswell as asking for help to make the question understood (I don't think my question deserve two separate meta questions). I may be wrong.

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  • Possible duplicate of On the troubles of naming and terminology
    – gnat
    Jun 22, 2017 at 11:52
  • @gnat Good find, gnat, thank you. According to the accepted answer on the linked question, I think my question would fall under category number 1: "What is the name of this well-known concept?"
    – xDaizu
    Jun 22, 2017 at 11:56
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    @xDaizu: it could fall under that category, if there would be a broadly accepted consensus about one name - which isn't, which turns your question into one of the type "What should I name this thing?".
    – Doc Brown
    Jun 22, 2017 at 20:39
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    @DocBrown Wouldn't the answer in that case be "There is no broadly accepted consensus." Does the questioner actually need to know that there actually is a broadly accepted word for something, even though he/she does not know what it is?
    – Alex
    Jun 26, 2017 at 14:24
  • @Alex: IMHO questions with the correct answer "There is no broadly accepted name" are seldom worth to be kept alive here on this site, and the fact there is no common name for "this well-known concept" is often an indicator for the concept not being so "well-known" as the questioner expected. I think it is fine when such a question is first asked, and during the close process the OP gets a feedback that his impression of "there must be a name for it" was probably wrong. The real problem here is, people just tend to take it way too personal when their question got downvoted and closed.
    – Doc Brown
    Jun 28, 2017 at 11:59
  • @DocBrown The consensus seem to be the other way around here: softwareengineering.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6338/…
    – Alex
    Jul 1, 2017 at 6:50
  • @Alex: I wrote "seldom", not "never". This is sometimes a jugement call, but this site has also a fair process for this, the "vote to reopen" process. However, the OP's question did not get any reopen votes so far.
    – Doc Brown
    Jul 1, 2017 at 10:16
  • @xDaizu: The accepted answer (written by me) only says that these questions might be on-topic. I think the jury's still out. Aug 16, 2017 at 0:32

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