It seems to me there is a difference of opinion about how to handle questions that would be considered overly broad, and that is leading to inconsistent handling of questions.
For your consideration, here are two questions...
The first that came along is "What are good resources for design patterns?", which is a two-liner, general, question asking for resources about design patterns.
The second, and most recent, is "design pattern for unit testing", which was, originally, a two-liner, general, question asking for resources about design patterns as they relate to unit testing.
It was brought up in the comments that the second question was too broad, and there was a close vote to that. But arguably the second question had more context because it was asking about design patterns as they pertain to unit testing and not just design patterns in general. I have no idea if there were any close votes on the first question as I don't have those privileges (yet). This question on Meta was raised which touches upon the topic of overly broad questions, but doesn't really discuss them in real detail and seems more focused on duplicate questions (which is quickly turning into an uncontrollable problem in the sites I frequent). Strictly speaking, neither of these question violate the guidelines of subjective questions which appears to be the gold standard for assessing the quality of a question.
I won't debate the point that either question is broad, but both questions have brought some useful answers (particularly the first). The broad questions of these types seem to be logical ones to ask, I'm sure everyone here has asked them at one point or another, but there are few places to ask them outside of the SE family of websites. Alternatives have yet to be presented by the objector(s) of the second question.
If the P.SE community does decide to close questions that are broad, that it should at least wait to see the quality of the answers before submitting the close vote. Or, better still, simply mark it as community wiki and let it fly. These are really not that much different than the "favorite tool/application/technique" questions that exist now and will always be asked.
The subjective guidelines are great—and people need to remember they are just guidelines and not strict rules—and judging something as being "overly broad" is just as subjective a topic. I think the community would benefit from a clear definition of "overly broad" and a consistent implementation that would result.
UPDATE: What I am proposing is that the definition of "broad", its existence as a reason to close, and the policy of closing for broad context should be revisited. While this isn't nearly as important as past issues, it is one that I think hasn't been hashed out enough and some questions (and possibly potential contributors) are suffering as a result. What one may consider a simple, basic question, another may consider a bad one. Is voting to close it really the best way to handle it, particularly if the topic would yield solid, basic answers? It's not as though the SE sites, SO and P.SE in particular, make any clearly stated assumptions and qualifications of the skill level of people who post questions. Until that happens, these types of questions are going to come up again and again, and I think there ought to be a better way of managing them.
