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I have seen it mentioned that since the C.SE has been active for so many years, there seem to be fewer new questions coming in. Given that, along with the high number of questions which have been closed due to errors in formulation, would it be copasetic for someone to rewrite some of those lingering ill-formed closed questions? (Assuming of course that it has been a long enough time that it appears the OP has abandoned the question?)

If so, would it be preferable for a person to open a whole new question page and reference back to the original question, or just edit the original? (I'm thinking one would need to begin a fresh question page in order to get Rep points for writing the question, true?)

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If a question already has answers then it is nearly always better to just make a new question. The old truth or primarily-opinion-based questions would require substantial edits to bring into line with the current site rules, and those edits would invalidate the existing answers. So to avoid having to delete those answers (which were often well received originally) it is better to just make a new question.

New questions are a different matter. For new questions we can try to help the OP to bring it into shape, and we can do that before there are many or even any answers of the off-topic question. And even if there are answers, we can often help those answerers to adjust their answers to make them match the edited questions.

There would be a small number of old closed questions which could be fairly easily edited to bring them on-topic, and which wouldn't invalid the existing answers. Even for those questions there's no harm making a new question instead of editing the old, but if someone did want to edit the old instead, they can be dealt with in a case by case manner.

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