When a question with a problem caused entirely by an obvious typo appears, the proper course of action is to close it. Unfortunately, it takes several minutes or longer to gather the five votes required to put the question on hold. This is more than enough for users who have no access to close/reopen votes to type up their answers, especially because these answers tend to be rather short. Even worse, some of these answers quickly gather an upvote or two, preventing OP from deleting the question.
I think it would be beneficial to expedite closing of questions with typos in some way. For example, we could let users with gold badges in a tag close questions with typos the "dupe-hammer style".
Enabling typo-hammer has several prerequisites:
- We need to work out a better definition of what we collectively consider a typo
- We need to move "cannot reproduce" into a separate category
- Closing comment on the typo category needs to become mandatory
In order to mitigate the risk of closing as typos by mistake, gold badge holders should get the power to reopen questions closed as typos with a single vote in the same way that they can reopen duplicates.
I think that an additional benefit of having typo-hammer in place is making participants more reluctant to answer questions caused by typos.
