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Closing self-answered question due to not being clear enough
I have a hard time deciding if How to get conditional running cumulative sum based on current row and previous rows? should be closed or not.
As mentioned in the comments, it was already flagged to be closed due to being confused.
The question has only one negative vote and the answer has no votes. As I am not knowledgeable in Python/Spark, I have difficulty understanding whether this should be closed.
Don't close questions for lack of detail/confusion is a related question. The consensus seems to be that closure is not a big issue, as it is for the OP to edit and have the question reopened. I am just not sure if this question is unclear to be closed.
3 answers
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Poorly asked questions should be closed. Why they are poorly asked (with confusing being only one instance of that) should have no bearing on closure.
Whether a question has answers or not should also have no bearing on closure. Closure is about the question. Just because someone may have guessed correctly what a badly worded question is asking, doesn't make the question good. Beside, how do we really know the guess is correct? Even if the question author ultimately says it answer the question, the whole Q&A does not leave a useful record. Someone else may come along later and interpret the question differently, then be misled by the answer.
Closing bad questions also makes a statement of what kinds of questions we want here, and what the minimum tolerated quality level is.
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A question should be closed when it cannot be meaningfully answered by someone who knows the topic. Which might indeed mean that the one(s) casting the close vote(s) would need domain knowledge.
That is, it would be impossible answering it without speculating or coming up with opinions. Or the question is unclear/too broad so that multiple answers would be required, or that the answer would be a "it depends". Or when multiple mostly unrelated related questions are asked at once.
Closing means that the question needs to be clarified by the original poster. Closing does not necessarily mean that the question is bad or unwanted. It is indeed no big deal to close a question, given that the OP is attentive to edit it into shape. Because that's what closing usually means: "can you edit this into shape?" For example, I don't really see why we should close rather than delete things that are blatantly off-topic.
For self-answered Q&A, that's a bit of a chapter of its own but then the OP themselves at least knows how to answer the question, even though the question itself might be unclear and unanswerable by anyone else. The OP has the advantage of being able to read their own mind in these cases :)
I think for the vast majority of self-answered, on-topic Q&A, the post can be fixed without closing and the OP just needs some pointers in how to improve it.
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Closing questions should be a last resort. Closed question are wasted opportunities to get more interesting and useful content, and potentially wasted opportunities to gain a new contributing user. When someone takes a chance on a low activity site like CD currently is, they are doing you favor. If the first reaction they get is people with a condescending, unhelpful attitude telling them to get lost... That is a great solution to the problem of "we have too many users, too much growth, too much good content".
Self answer are an even easier decision. Once we know what the answer is supposed to be, it is easy for anyone to edit the question and improve it, which also teaches the new user how to improve it. People helping you learn the site is a much better new user experience.
Occasionally, someone posts a self answer that is such a tangled mess that there's no fixing it. IMO this is very rare, but okay, it happens. The linked question certainly isn't an example of that. It appears to me that the OP is trying to take a grouped sum of a filtered Cartesian product. He mistakenly used the term "cumulative sum", even though that's not it, that's his main sin. Hopefully he either edits the question or confirms in comments that he cumsum really isn't what he meant - though given the "warm welcome" he got I wouldn't be surprised if he didn't bother.
It's easy to quibble over minor things like a misused term. Meanwhile this is the first Spark question on the site, which is a very popular QA topic (82k questions on Stack!), and it's even a real world problem rather than a trivial hello world thing, so it can drive a lot of organic, quality traffic from search engines. Especially considering that the OP is knowledgeable enough to post an answer, and that an answered question is much more valuable for site growth than unanswered (it shows potential new users that there is a chance their question will get answered by someone, and they wouldn't just be screaming into the void). Regulars of the site should be helping this user improve his question through comments, rather than shouting him down.
Again, since when is our problem that we have too many users, contributing too much content? Was this site started because people got annoyed at how Stack sites are too friendly, and we desperately need a meaner, less welcoming place?
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