We've got an old, popular question which IMHO is deserving of a historical lock - marking it as a significant question, but not one which should be serving us as an example or a guideline for what we accept. The question is Help Me Find The Unnecessary Words, which provides a paragraph and challenges members to edit it by chopping words out.
I think this question should be locked for the following reasons:
It falls afoul of our more recent discussion, where we decided that rephrasing requests are off-topic. You can copy-paste all the reasons cited there, but to summarize: such a question invites many rephrase suggestions, most interchangeable, and is of little use to others. Such a question is only useful in the long term by expanding its scope tremendously into general guidelines on the topic of editing, and that is not the sort of content we want to encourage here.
The top-voted answer (currently at +29, beating out second place by 16 votes) demonstrates the problematic nature of the question: it doesn't provide a suggestion for the challenge at all; instead, it states that the question is a poor match for the site, and proceeds to offer general editorial guidelines (quite excellent ones, I will add). In other words, the top-voted answer does not answer the question, except inasmuch as it would equally answer any such question about any other text. Will we decree editorial excision exercises on-topic, but point them all at our existing answer? That makes no sense.
This question is indeed being suggested as justification for allowing new low-quality questions on the site.
Since I know at least one or two members are likely to object to a historical lock on this question, I'm bringing the topic up on Meta before I actually do anything. Objections and agreement are both welcome.
