Why is this opinion-list-making question still open?

Question

This is the question in question, quoted for your convenience:

What specifically did Hillary Clinton say or do, to seem untrustworthy to Americans?

I am not from the US but I keep reading that Hillary is perceived as untrustworthy. I tried looking for the things she actually said or did to earn this image, but I can't find many.

So I'm looking for a list of verifiable things that she actually said or did, to earn her this image (without judging whether or not she deserved it).

So far, what I've found are the

1. the email controversy,
2. the pneumonia episode,
3. her changing position on gay marriage, and
4. her changing position on free trade.

What else is there?

As you can see, it's soliciting the creation of a list, with a thin veil of "verifiable things", presumably for us to vote-on in a sort-of "poll".

This is one of those classic "list questions" that Stack Exchange long ago had to deal with. A "list question" is actually short-hand for a class of off-topic question, which SE Community Manager Shog9♦ defines as follows:

It's... Shorthand. For straw-polls, GTKYs, discussion threads and the like. Questions that are geared toward creating responses, not answers... It arose before we had these nifty Meta-filter-derived bullets in our FAQs:

To prevent your question from being flagged and possibly removed, avoid asking subjective questions where …

• every answer is equally valid: “What’s your favorite ______?”
• your answer is provided along with the question, and you expect more answers: “I use ______ for ______, what do you use?”
• there is no actual problem to be solved: “I’m curious if other people feel like I do.”
• we are being asked an open-ended, hypothetical question: “What if ______ happened?”
• it is a rant disguised as a question: “______ sucks, am I right?”

This list seems very applicable to this question:

• Every answer is equally valid (can these opinions even be validated?):
  • "What's your favorite thing or things Hillary did to make you not trust her?"
• An answer is provided along with the question, but expects more answers:
  • "I use this list for evaluating trust, what do you use?"
• This isn't really a problem-solving site, but you get the idea:
  • "Some people don't trust her, I’m curious if other people feel that way."
• Very-open-ended and these answers are very hypothetical.
  • "What are the possible reasons people don't trust her?"
• I wouldn't call this a rant, but it is pretty close.
  • "Some people think Hillary is untrustworthy, are they right?"

To be honest, I'm not even sure a good scientific study is even possible for a question like this. Among those who think her untrustworthy if polled, stated reason(s), perceived reason(s), and actually reason(s) could be very different things. Not that it really matters, as none of the existing answers come close to this level of objectivity.

One of the alleged reasons is a list of lies that she supposedly told, of which #4 reads as follows:

Sir Edmund Hillary – Seems Clinton can’t even bring herself to tell the truth about her own name. She claimed to be named after Sir Edmund Hillary, one of the first men to climb Mt. Everest. One small problem though, the explorer didn’t climb Everest until Clinton was 6 years old.

So many problems...

• There is no related information on public perception to this incident.
• Is there actually anyone who would point to this and say "that's why I distrust her"?
• Is this list a good list, if silly mistakes like this make the list? Or is this just some silly internet list inflated with nonsense to be larger?
• The fact that he climbed Everest 6 years later doesn't actually even prove that she wasn't named after him.
• Is it really a "lie" if you were genuinely mistaken about something that happened when you were a small child?

If we accept questions like this, what's next?

• "What things made people say Obama/Bush/Clinton/etc. was a bad president?"
• "What things make people mistrust Putin/Queen Elizabeth/Kim Jong-un/François Hollande/etc.?"
• "What are Trumps's/McCain's/Romney's/Cheney/Gore/etc. most sexist comments?"

This seems like a bad precedent to set.

To be clear here, I'm not saying that there aren't people who think Hillary is untrustworthy, or that the question of why people think she is untrustworthy is a bad question to have (it actually seems like a good, if extremely broad question to ponder). The problem is, the question being asked here is neither, and it's just turning into some superficial master-internet-list. For this list to be useful towards answering these questions, these lists need references for why these particular lists may make people find her untrustworthy. Why do they outweigh the hypothetical list of everything else done in their life? I expect a list of lies and wrong-doing can be made about most people in politics, what makes the lists being posted significant compared to those lists of people considered trustworthy? Which items contribute the most? What studies were conducted? Anything? These lists certainly aren't telling me why she is considered untrustworthy.

These types of problem answers were also addressed by SE a long time ago in Good Subjective, Bad Subjective with "Guidelines for Great Subjective Questions"; here are some relevant ones:

1. Great subjective questions inspire answers that explain "why" and "how". The best subjective questions invite explanation. If you're asking for a product recommendation of some kind, you want answers to contain detailed information about the features and how they can be used, and why you might want to choose one over the other. "How?" and "Why?" has more lasting value than a bunch of product-feature bullet points or a giant enumerated list, no matter how extensive. In contrast, the bad subjective questions let answerers get away with hit-and-run answers that maybe provide a name and a link -- but fail to provide any sort of adequate explanation, context, or background.

5. Great subjective questions insist that opinion be backed up with facts and references. Opinion isn't all bad, so long as it's backed up with something other than "because I'm an expert", or "because I said so", or "just because". Use your specific experiences to back up your opinions, as above, or point to some research you've done on the web or elsewhere that provides evidence to support your claims. We like you. We want to believe you. But like Wikipedia itself, {{citation needed}}. And good subjective questions make this clear from the outset: back it up!

Personally, I think this question qualifies as "primarily opinion-based", "too broad" (infinite possible answers), and generally off-topic as-per Shog9♦'s reasoning.

So apart from the unsuccessful trip through the review queue, why is this opinion-list-making question still open?

Answer 1

It may be the case that the question is soliciting a list, but Hillary Clinton definitely did have a reputation of being dishonest, and she had that reputation before the emails thing blew up, and before most of things that people like to point at nowadays to justify her reputation as being dishonest.

Despite the OP's intent, I believe that a question asking what in the world this reputation came from is a good question to have.

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It sounds like you're getting confused by the fact that the subject matter has something to do with opinions. That's not related to what Opinion-based means. A question is opinion-based if it is asking for the opinion of the answer-writer.

The reason why we close questions as opinion-based are because we want to avoid answers that depend too heavily on the point of view of the answer-writer. An answer that depends to heavily on the point of view of the answer writer is undesirable because it is not readily consumed by others and it has a high chance of being straight up wrong.

This is not the same when the question is about an observable phenomenon where a notable group of people or a notable person has a particular opinion, and there might be an observable catalyst that occurred that might cause that opinion to form. They might even have a stated reason for having that opinion.