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I wonder why RK for spring pendulum was closed (put on hold). What exactly is out of scope? Why it requires a professional consultant?

This question should've been tagged as homework probably but why out of scope? One can see that OP put some effort into it and probably he's not fluent with Mathematica yet. But it seems to be an ok student problem that would've been answered eventually with nice explaination of how Runge Kutta works and most likely featuring neat animation. And the RK is quite popular and common not to call the question too localized.

There are lot of question like "here's a link, do same in Mathematica" and these questions are not closed, sometime they attract great answers, like how-to-make-this-beautiful-animation

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    Except MMA issues, which are on topic, you were discussing with OP math issues and OP's understanding of the problem formulation. That was why I've voted off topic. Maybe it was too tough considering other questions here. But it takes 5 votes to close and additionaly you can vote to reopen too. We can talk about each question but maybe chat/comment will be a better place.
    – Kuba
    Commented Jun 6, 2016 at 8:02
  • @Kuba I totally agree that we don't want any questionable closing to produce a shadow question on Meta SE :) I asked because I'm curious about formal criteria that would suggest closing pendulum question and being fine with hypocycloid question
    – BlacKow
    Commented Jun 6, 2016 at 15:29
  • Some who voted to close agree with you. Two people voted to close the question as 'too localized'. However, only the majority reason was given in the closing notice. But note that only three user IDs are given as voting for the stated closing reason.
    – m_goldberg
    Commented Jun 6, 2016 at 16:59
  • @m_goldberg Yes, I can see that. Yet my question isn't really about this particular closing. I provided links to two questions, one was closed the other was answered and received a ton of up votes for the question itself and proposed answers. There should be an easy to use criteria to differentiate between these two questions. So what is it?
    – BlacKow
    Commented Jun 6, 2016 at 17:37
  • @BlacKow "I asked because I'm curious about formal criteria [...]" -- May be there is no simple criteria, and we have to use some neural network models to predict the actions stemming from the neural networks of the closers. (I made suggestions in the same vein in other meta discussions, so I might be going overboard, but in this case I am more serious.)
    – Anton Antonov
    Commented Jun 6, 2016 at 23:31
  • @BlacKow I agree that the closing looks unfair compared to the popular but much lazier one you linked. If you want to post a answer, I would vote to re-open it. On the other hand, if nothing happens for a few days I think it deserves to remain closed because one could indeed say the RK4 method is already available in NDSolve, so the question didn't add much to the other one that it linked to. For generally unattractive questions it's just sometimes hard to give a concise closing reason...
    – Jens
    Commented Jun 8, 2016 at 18:14
  • To me, the issue in the question seems a simple mistake: failure to initialize a variable, which is explicitly pointed out in the error message, which the OP misread. The OP perhaps accidentally deleted it from the code being adapted. So I agree with the closure but not with the cited reason.
    – Michael E2
    Commented Jun 13, 2016 at 13:46
  • As for other LQ questions, I don't think one can expect consistency from a site governed like this one. The users have a wide variety of areas of subject-matter expertise as well as a wide variety of expertise with Mathematica. You will get some variation in how questions are evaluated and only five need to agree for an action to be taken.
    – Michael E2
    Commented Jun 13, 2016 at 14:05

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