Why was this question reopened?

Question

Recently we had a question on gender neutral German job advertisements:

Do German job ads have to specify both female and male role types?

No doubt that the question is interesing, and it is also answerable but it had several issues:

1. There were four related but different questions asked in one.
2. Only one of these on the ending /in is about the German language as defined in our FAQ.
3. All other questions were about legal or cultural aspects, which I believe are off topic as not related to the language.
4. The question was even tagged culture further indicating that language may not have been the major concern of the question.

This made me believe the question was off topic and I put it on hold. We could have edited the question to make it on topic, but we had agreed to not perform such edits if they changed too much of the original poster's intention.

I asked the OP to edit their question to put more focus on the language aspect. I would not have hesitated to reopen it then, because I really believe it is an interesting topic to have. Sadly this did not happen.

Instead the community decided to reopen it without any such edits. And - foreseeably - we are now having comments discussing exactly those cultural and legal issues.

As we had not extended our topics to allow questions on cultural, legal, historical, or political aspects of Germany I now feel quite confused as to why this question was reopened, and how we should handle future questions about topics not related to the German language.

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Additional note: now that the question was re-opened and was answered I made minor edits to the title and the question body in the hope this resolved the issue.

Answer 1

Now I feel compelled to justify myself since I was one of the five users who voted for reopening.

I read this post when it was still open.
The first question was

Is the Entwickler/in referring to both genders of developers?

I consider this question on topic and answerable.

The second question was

(…) do German job ads typically have to use this kind of /in notation to avoid being sexist?

This is not a completely new question, but directly referring to the first one. It is asking for clarification of the rationale of this topic and the everyday use from an employer’s perspective.

The last question was

(…) Would a woman apply for a job whose ad only specified the male form and vice versa?

This question is asking about the use from an employee’s perspective.

The answer to the first question would be a simple “yes”. Anybody answering this question would certainly want to give more explanations, and the additional questions give a kind hint about the actual interests of the inquirer.

Then, the question was suddenly closed with a single vote and a reference to the Allgemeines Gleichbehandlungsgesetz of 2006, which does not answer the question. Consequently, I voted for reopening.

It is true though that the discussion, which ensued after my vote, seems to be partly off topic; however, the question is not.

Nevertheless, the community appears to hold various differing views, which I respect. Therefore, I would like to apologize for any inconvenience my vote may have caused.

After this incident and considering the recent discussion about close reasons, I am unclear about the current requirements and expectations of the community. The closing of questions appears to be purely arbitrary. Since I cannot rule out the possibility that this is my misunderstanding, I think I’d better refrain from any further close or reopen vote.