[spolsky]

I do agree that our community sometimes misapplies the rules. We study this regularly and are continuously working on tweaking and improving the moderation system to reduce the incidence of good questions which are closed. But trust me when I say that 98% of the questions that are closed are not anything you would ever want to land on as the result of a Google search. Look here and tell me what you think:

http://stackoverflow.com/search?tab=newest&q=closed%3a1

[dionidium]

There's no doubt this is true (and I think I said as much). I agree that the dial should be there. We're just arguing about how far to turn it.

[saurik]

Exactly; way too often in arguments like this (such as with Wikipedia) people point at the places where something worked while totally ignoring the costs of false positives, as if the people who want "different" or "slightly less" moderation are somehow calling for "no" moderation... it's a total strawman.