I've noticed that we get a lot of questions from first time visitors to Philosophy.SE which are just very confused and in need of serious editing. Often, the confusion is hopeless, or the question off-topic.
Occasionally, though, I have noticed that there are poorly formulated questions that might have an appropriate question in the vicinity. For instance, this question was recently closed and I think quite reasonably so (in fact I was one of the first downvoters). But, as I noted in the comments when I was explaining my downvote, it does seem as though there is a good question in the vicinity, namely "Is it ethical to do something without a good (moral) reason for doing it?".
Now, it seems rare that these newcomers actually reformulate their questions as suggested. In these cases, should we be more proactive with the editing, deferring less to the OP and trying to extract an interesting philosophical question from the confusion? Or, should we just let the question fall by the wayside?
I ask just because I wonder if we might be scaring too many people off and missing opportunities to get good answers to good questions (which, as a practical matter, we need to do with more frequency if we hope to graduate beta). At the same time I recognize that we need a certain amount of deference to the OP and shouldn't do too much violence to their original question.
Is there a good general guideline here? Do we always just leave it to the OP to edit their question? Or could we, perhaps, have more advanced users edit the question and try to clear the edit with the OP (or, if the OP vanishes, perhaps make the question a community wiki so that it isn't attributed to OP)?