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WSL2 duplicated terminal was Mod-closed as "Needs clarity or details", but even as originally written it was (again) quite understandable to me. It definitely had two problems:

  • The new user made a simple Markdown formatting error in that only one line break was placed between paragraphs rather than two. You can see this in the (almost identical) side-by-side edit on Revision 2 that I made.

  • The grammar is poor, but not unreadable. Clearly the user is not a native-English speaker, and that should be okay here -- We don't all have that luxury. The community can assist with grammar clean-up, and hopefully help the user improve through the process.

    I have not yet had a chance to clean up the grammar myself, but I will. However, with the addition of the paragraph breaks, the question should at least be understandable by a casual reader. Would the question simply have been closed for the grammar you see in Revision #2? Not typically, I wouldn't think.

Perhaps I'm missing some other reason why someone would VTC this as unclear, but again, if the question as-written is understandable (and answerable by) a subject-matter-expect on the topic, it's not unclear.

So should the question have been force-closed for such a simple and easily correctable formatting error and poor grammar? Are these truly valid close-reasons (let alone Mod-close reasons)?

I've made excuses for mods here before in assuming that they have a lot to review and can't spend time editing-to-improve, but (a) I've been told by one of the mods in chat that this isn't really the case -- They are not overwhelmed and have time to help, and (b) it took less than 5 seconds to fix the formatting issue.

Isn't closing a question (especially Mod-closing) supposed to be reserved for those that aren't salvageable by the community? Shouldn't a Mod give the community a chance to review and fix those that are easily correctable (if not fix them themselves)?

Related "general" (not question-specific) Meta posts:

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  • I don't get what the question is about after reading even the corrected version 😅
    – Journeyman Geek Mod
    Commented Dec 6, 2022 at 12:39
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    @JourneymanGeek Most people wouldn't, I agree, but someone with experience in the nuances of Windows Terminal and WSL should. It's not an easy question, regardless, but IMHO that makes it an even better one (once cleaned up). I'll work on cleaning up the grammar on it, which should make it more clear even to a non-SME. I don't have the answer yet, but I do have some suspicions on what's going wrong. Commented Dec 6, 2022 at 12:46
  • @JourneymanGeek It's likely somewhat related to one of these two questions, with a touch of another underlying issue as well. The second one of those (which almost got closed as a duplicate) was pretty tough to figure out, but I happened almost by chance to end up reproducing the issue. Commented Dec 6, 2022 at 12:50
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    “The grammar is poor, but not unreadable.” - Great, an editor can improve the quality of the question and it will be placed in the queue to be reopened. What shouldn’t happen, is a question with poor grammar, be reopened without being edited. A question with grammatical mistakes should be closed so it can be improved in my opinion
    – Ramhound
    Commented Dec 7, 2022 at 1:37
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    @Ramhound If 5 community members deem it unsalvageable before 1 community member is kind enough to help out an ESL new contributor, then so be it. But mod-closing short-circuits the community process. It should be reserved for truly garbage posts. This wasn't. Commented Dec 7, 2022 at 1:48
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    You mention it being "place in the queue" to be reopened, but for some reason have no problem with it completely skipping the queue to be closed. Commented Dec 7, 2022 at 1:49

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