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Comments on What is our position on picture identification with no research?

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What is our position on picture identification with no research?

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Yesterday a user posted two picture identification questions with no apparent prior research. The same user did this a couple of months ago too. At that time, I spent a few minutes with Google Earth and was easily able to find where a couple of the pictures were taken, so I conclude that even the basic research wasn't done.

The site guidelines have this to say about researching questions before posting:

In addition to just making sure your question hasn't been asked already here, take a few moments to search beyond the site. If you put your question title into a search engine, can you find the answer to your question in the first three results? If so, perhaps consider alternative ways of sharing that information here on Codidact, or writing a self-answered question to share that knowledge.

Since I was able to find the location in a few minutes in Google Earth, it was clear that no research had been done. When the two new questions appeared yesterday, it looked like the same thing. If any research was done, it was certainly not mentioned in the questions. They appeared to be just pictures, like two months ago.

I've left comments asking what the poster had already tried, but these comments were deleted.

This question is about how we want to handle picture-identification questions with no research. What should we expect of people posting questions, and what should we expect of people commenting on these posts? Does our response differ if there is a pattern of behavior?

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I don't think "where was this picture taken?" questions are generally helpful to the community.[1] There are places out there that do "view from my window" type contests where players use information in the photo to try to nail down where it is, but those are challenges posted by someone who knows the answer. They're games, not conventional Q&A. If Outdoors wanted to have a "challenges" or "games" category, it could host those kinds of puzzles if people are interested.

A couple of the questions are instead "is this picture from such-and-such location?". Those seem like they could be a better fit, though it's unfortunate when lots of these show up at once and push down other questions.

It seems, from voting on these questions and here on meta, that the small community here isn't too interested in "location-identification" questions. The problem is compounded by the volume; visitors to the community see a front page full of downvoted photo-ID questions and probably don't realize the scope here is much broader.

Most of these questions are unanswered, but a couple have answers. Maybe that means most people don't find them interesting but a few people do.

I propose that we do one of three things with at least the first type I described ("where is this picture taken?"):

  1. Decide they are off-topic and close the ones we have.
  2. Decide that they are interesting challenges to some people here and give them their own space (a different category).
  3. Decide they are ok in limited numbers and have a rule that any given person can have one such unanswered question at a time. This might encourage askers to either improve the existing question in hopes of getting an answer or delete it to make room for another. (We don't have any tooling for this, but on a community Somewhere Else we had voluntary rules about posting frequency for one category of questions, and the community largely followed it and enforced it when necessary.)

  1. A possible exception, noted in a comment, is a picture that you have a connection to and at least some context for. Example: a picture you (or someone you know) took from a tour bus but you don't remember details (but you know where you were touring in general and maybe even know locations of pictures before and after this one on your camera, so you can narrow it down). Questions about pictures you have some personal connection to, and have shared information about, feel different from "I found this picture; where is it?". ↩︎

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3 comment threads

Another possible exception might be widely known pictures. For example the default background image o... (5 comments)
The questions were being received just fine until this meta post got started and then everybody start... (5 comments)
Some ID questions are OK (3 comments)
The questions were being received just fine until this meta post got started and then everybody start...
Charlie Brumbaugh‭ wrote about 3 years ago

The questions were being received just fine until this meta post got started and then everybody started downvoting them. Also, without these, this site would be like photography and have basically no questions.

Monica Cellio‭ wrote about 3 years ago

Were they? I don't recall the sequence; I know I've seen and downvoted some before I saw this thread, and then a recent batch came in after this thread. I think I would have voted the same way with or without this thread, but of course that's hard to know.

I have not downvoted all of them, and I might have even upvoted one. I consider each post on its merits. Just a picture with no details and nothing else to make it interesting -- like, just a random picture as opposed to something unusual -- does not add to the community in my opinion, and that informs my vote.

I agree this community and Photo are struggling, but I'm not convinced that these questions will help us grow.

Charlie Brumbaugh‭ wrote about 3 years ago

If you go back to 4 months ago https://outdoors.codidact.com/posts/282747 https://outdoors.codidact.com/posts/279173 https://outdoors.codidact.com/posts/281950 and compare to the ones after two months ago when this meta post was written there is a sharp increase in downvotes.

Without these, there wouldn't be hardly any questions and given the level of effort users are putting into answers, there isn't much reason to ask different questions.

Olin Lathrop‭ wrote about 3 years ago

"without these, this site would be like photography and have basically no questions" Lowering quality standards is not a sustainable way to get volume. This site has low volume because we haven't gotten the word out, and possibly because search engines are penalizing us for all the old copied content.

Olin Lathrop‭ wrote about 3 years ago

"If you go back to 4 months", there you are before we got deluged with just picture dumps. Your historic picture in the Sierras is a good example. You gave some context, and seemed to have some personal interest. That's quite different from the more recent raw dumps of pictures from a travel book or some video on the net. It's hard to define it, but the best description so far is you need to have a personal connection to the picture, tell us the context, and show that you've tried the obvious methods.