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Closing Articles
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Closing of a question typically does not only prohibit the addition of further answers but also signals to the content creator and future visitors that something is seriously wrong with the content and needs to be improved (see also comments by Moshi and Olin). This signal is conveyed with a custom message that is displayed next to the post.
In case of articles almost all the typical close reasons apply. Articles can be off-topic, duplicates of other articles or Q&A, too short and maybe there are a couple of other things that can make them problematic.
The difficulty here is mostly wording. Question can be closed. Articles cannot. They can rather be marked or flagged as something. Close voting isn't (technically) much different from flagging.
We mostly need a new word for the action on articles and a discussion of which of these actions are reasonable. It's like gluing small post-it notes on content (Wikipedia does that too sometimes) with some kind of meta information, additionally to disallowing certain actions like answering questions.
So maybe we should rename "Close" to "Mark" or something else on articles.
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While I can see the point here, I also don't see much benefit in allowing articles to be closed.
The only function closing has is to prevent a post being answered. That's all it does; it doesn't de-list the post or change it in any other way. Given that articles don't have answers, that makes it a no-op.
Let's explore this in more detail. We have deletion, which allows for completely off-topic or unsalvageable posts to be removed. What extra function would closure serve that you're looking for on articles? Maybe there's other functionality that would be useful that we could look at instead.
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