The question Why has English become the global language? was recently put on hold. As it is a migrated question, it appears that it cannot be reopened by voting.
According to the Help Center (Privileges),
Closing is a democratic voting process where the community identifies questions that duplicate existing content, are unreasonable to answer in their current state, or do not belong on the site.
That's clear enough, except that what has just happened to this question isn't very democratic.
- 5 people out of I don't know how many hundreds of active, eligible users voted to close.
- In the review queue, 2 people (plus me, so 3 in total) voted to leave this question open, 1 voted to close it. This means that four of the votes to close did not use the review queue; there is no such option for those who think a question should remain open.
- Users can, indirectly, indicate they think a question should remain open by up voting the question. This question has 8 upvotes and 2 downvotes, leaving a balance of + 6 (as against only 5 votes to close).
- This question has an answer drawing on reputable academic sources which has 12 upvotes at the time of writing.
As @sempaiscuba has pointed out in a comment, there are more potential voters than closers. Nonetheless, both the question and one answer have a decent number of upvotes. Closing this question is a clearly against the majority view, and the majority has no means of doing anything about it (however big that majority is). This seems to me to be serious flaw in the system.
The Help Center clearly says that closing is a democratic process. Can we please find a way to respect the spirit and intent of the site by reopening this question?