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I don't notice much use of "Historical Locks" on this site.

About historical locks:

A historical lock preserves older content that was very popular when it was originally posted, but is now off-topic or otherwise out of scope for the site it is posted on.

Is there a reason we're not using historical locks for these old questions? Or has it just not come up yet?

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  • Why do you think that that question would be closed today?
    – SIMEL
    Commented Oct 24, 2013 at 14:25
  • The big bang is a very notable claim by itself.
    – SIMEL
    Commented Oct 24, 2013 at 17:58
  • I think these types of questions ... Which types of questions? I had to go through the edit history to understand what you were talking about. You might like to edit again to make your question more readable.
    – TRiG
    Commented Oct 29, 2013 at 16:48

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Historical locks have been used on some old questions:

So, it should be clear that there is no policy against them.

I would suggest there are two reasons why they are not widely used.

  1. The mods haven't noticed these questions recently. If you see a question that should be locked, bring it to our attention with a flag.

  2. Many of our policies about question quality are to ensure the question warrants answering and to ensure the answers are going to be high quality (e.g. not strawmen, or bogged down in bickering over definitions). Where there is a question that has already garnered an excellent answer that makes the Internet a better place, complaining about the question quality seems moot. I can see an argument that 'it stops people using it as a precedent,' but I am strongly tempted to keep my clumsy moderator paws off the Big Bang question which is highly upvoted and has some top-notch answers.

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  • Cool. Thank you for explaining. Regarding the Big Bang question, one of the criteria for using a historical lock is "The post is stellar, in spite of its off-topic nature". Another is "There are a large number of views, upvotes and inbound links on the post". So, I don't think it would be considered using your clumsy moderator paws.
    – user5582
    Commented Oct 24, 2013 at 1:27

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