This question regarding great achievements of political science was just closed by the community. I voted to close it myself, but I am interested in finding out how we can hammer it into something openable.

Economics.SE has some questions which resemble this one, such as "What are some results in Economics that are both a consensus and far from common sense?"

Are we also open to these kinds of questions? If so, how can we make this question openable?

Potentially Related:

  • If your own CV was indeed "too broad", how does this relate to your 2nd para? Isn't the main problem most saw in it indeed that this Q asks for an opinion based list? – LangLangC Mar 6 at 19:50
  • @LangLangC There is no relationship between those two things, which means I should probably take it out. Thanks for the feedback. – indigochild Mar 6 at 20:00

That was closed as being too broad because of how open ended it was. A concrete answer to that question would be of unbounded size. On Politics.SE we expect questions to be a bit more specific than that.

We would likely have closed questions like the one at Economics.SE too, for the same reason.

  • Any list of great achievements will tend to be short so perhaps unboundedness is not a problem. – H2ONaCl Mar 7 at 20:12
  • Agreed. So how can this be altered into an acceptable request? – indigochild Mar 7 at 21:51
  • I don't have an objection to the question so I voted to reopen. I also posted my answer to the original question. – H2ONaCl Mar 7 at 21:57

One possible solution would be to rephrase the question from "What are the achievements..." to "Have there been any achievements..." The first one is an open-ended list question, the second one ultimately boils down to a yes or no. A good yes answer would then (hopefully) include a concrete example of an achievement, which would accomplish the same thing and provide the OP with the information they are seeking while still keeping the scope of what would be required of a good answer to something that is manageable.

What constitutes an "achievement" is still somewhat opionated, but an answer could provide relevant sources to back up why they believe a specific example is actually an achievement.

  • Rephrasing to "have there been any greats" seems to me not much different from "what are the greats". A reasonable answer could be "yes" and the supporting evidence could be a list of 2 or 3 examples where each example is strong and none obviously weaker than the others. If you ask for the "greats" then it necessarily is a short list so I don't think that the unboundedness of the question is a serious problem. I have posted a short list. – H2ONaCl Mar 7 at 20:25
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    @H2ONaCl It is not much different at all. The only difference I was trying to convey is that the scope of the question in that form is more limited. Since the current concern about the question is that it is too broad, limiting the scope in my mind is the solution to address those concerns. – Jeff Lambert Mar 8 at 14:54

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