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What is our stance on questions about muscle tightness? Are they on-topic or off-topic?

For example, the question: What metric is used when quantifying muscle tightness? attracted one close vote, with the following reason:

I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it is not about any biological mechanism.

Aren't questions regarding muscle tightness about a physiological mechanism, and therefore on-topic on this Stack Exchange website?

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  • $\begingroup$ Downvotes mean on-topic or off-topic? $\endgroup$
    – Franck Dernoncourt
    Nov 28 '16 at 19:46
  • $\begingroup$ On Meta, voting is indicative of agreement or disagreement to the topic being discussed, or for answers, the proposed way of solving the question. See here. $\endgroup$
    – MattDMo
    Nov 29 '16 at 12:47
  • $\begingroup$ @MattDMo Should I infer that asking questions about the scope of this Stack Exchange website is not welcome? $\endgroup$
    – Franck Dernoncourt
    Nov 29 '16 at 16:08
  • $\begingroup$ absolutely not. I didn't downvote your question, and I really don't know why someone would. I've been on the SE network for quite a few years now, with probably a couple dozen questions and thousands of answers, and you just need to get used to the fact that there are occasional drive-by downvotes for no particular reason. The good news is that voting doesn't affect your rep on Meta. $\endgroup$
    – MattDMo
    Nov 29 '16 at 16:12
  • $\begingroup$ You can edit your question on muscle tightness to add the necessary background and details, and then we can have it reopened. $\endgroup$
    – WYSIWYG
    Dec 1 '16 at 5:51
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Questions about muscle physiology and metrics to quantify the physiological aspects are on-topic. However, your question itself is quite poorly worded and contains no explanation whatsoever.

I wonder what metric is used when quantifying muscle tightness.

There are possibly several methods to test muscle tightness. It is generally expected from the OP that they put some effort in their questions. There are two reasons for this:

  1. It reduces unnecessary burden on others to do the basic background work (i.e. the 'homework'). Moreover, since you have asked the question it is a general etiquette that you provide all necessary explanation instead of outrightly demanding an answer from the others.
  2. It provides a context to the question and the details would make the question more specific. This reduces the effort of the answerer, attracts higher quality answers and also conforms to the SE policy of keeping the answers crisp, terse and to-the-point.

Downvotes in the main site indicates that the voter thinks that the question is not useful or is of low quality. The tooltip says:

This question does not show any research effort; it is unclear or not useful.

So, even on-topic questions can be downvoted if they lack quality.

In meta (especially discussions), downvote can also indicate a disagreement.

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