This post was originally posted elsewhere, and as post moving isn't implemented as of yet, I've deleted it, and reposted this one. Quoting Monica Cellio‭ in a comment under the post:

A help topic about closing should explain the general reasoning and how it works, as you said, and it'd be great to have the community-specific close reasons available. Those might need to be somewhere else, behind a link, so that the help topic itself could be static and easily shared across the network.

Reactions are also defined per community; should we take a similar approach there?

Those might need to be somewhere else, behind a link, so that the help topic itself could be static and easily shared across the network.

But why? The help center already has topics unique to each community. I'm not following along here.

Those might need to be somewhere else, behind a link, so that the help topic itself could be static and easily shared across the network.

Yeah, sure. I don't really see any downsides to that. Help pages shouldn't be too complicated to amend when need be, so better include that too, and revise it later.

But why? The help center already has topics unique to each community. I'm not following along here.

Sorry -- let me try again. Each community can "fork" help topics to locally customize them, and can also add new topics. EE, for example, has done significant rearranging of their help. That's all fine -- the issue is that if we later update one of the "core" pages, we can't push those updates to communities with local modifications. Closing seems like a topic where we might want to add or adjust guidance over time; if the community-specific reasons are part of the page, those edits would need to be made individually in each community. On the other hand, if the help topic is general and has a site-relative link where you can see the specific local close reasons, the main topic remains sharable.

Monica Cellio‭ Ah. I'd rather not sacrifice the final presentation for solving issues behind the scene. I understand how for now, we need to keep things that way, but it gives us an important point to discuss in https://meta.codidact.com/posts/290439.

if the community-specific reasons are part of the page, those edits would need to be made individually in each community

Not necessarily. We can build pages by merging subsections of them, after each time something is updated. So either, we have one list, which pulls from two data locations (shared + community local), or we have two lists, which are merged into different parts of the text on the page. The issue with merging like this, is that communities can't change the help text, only append to it. I'm not sure if that's too much of an issue, though. Ideally, I shouldn't have to read the entire help center for each different community. We can change the system to allow not only additions to the merged text, but also changes, although

that'll probably be a pain to manage.