Also: I thoroughly agree with David Speyer. We need to reopen our doors to mathematicians asking questions in fields they are unfamiliar with.

Educating people about providing some background about their own background is part of this, but I think more importantly we just need to give more people more leeway.

I'd like to thank many of you for your supportive comments. I am slightly reassured that a number of the upvotes were intended to support Lucy against having her question closed rather than to indicate that people agreed with her suggestion of sexism. Like mvsapir, I did google Lucy and algebraic geometry and have a fair idea who she is likely to be. But it is irrelevant because I never doubted that Lucy was a real person or a real mathematician. If she is reading this thread then I hope she has understood this. So I propose to end this part of the thread (I probably should have opened up a different thread on this issue).

I feel that MO is still a good place for questions outside you area. However there have been more and more "crank/hw" questions that really are not appropriate to this site that has made people more militant in closing of what could be good questions.

To avoid this one has to make it clear the question is well thought out. My favorite example of a question that "looked" so trivial and like homework that it nearly got closed but turned out to be a great question is fttp://mathoverflow.net/questions/83508/the-second-homotopy-group-of-a-simple-cw-complex/83584#83584
I feel this is one of my best contributions to MO because via a series of comments I helped clarify that the question is non-trivial and really about geometric group theory and retagged it as such so that the right people (Agol in this case) would see it and give the answer that people who know small cancellation theory well would all know but that somebody from outside would not.

Let me end by saying I have never had a non-CW question closed (and none with a vote-to-close since I obtained 3K rep) yet many of my questions were outside my area. Whenever I post a question from outside of group or semigroup theory (my area) I make that fact clear and I explain the motivation (which has sometimes been idle curiosity and sometimes from my research). For example, see http://mathoverflow.net/questions/83585/does-the-following-condition-imply-the-homotopy-type-of-a-wedge-of-spheres

My experience is that this usually avoids closure for anything that isn't truly undergrad level.