Comments on What is our position on picture identification with no research?
Parent
What is our position on picture identification with no research?
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?
Post
I'm separating this for voting purposes (since the other answer already has votes).
In another answer I proposed some options for dealing with picture-identification questions. The "mildest" of these options, in terms of disruption to the community, is:
- 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.)
Some time has passed since this question was asked. Should we try this -- ID questions are ok (as they seem to be, by default, now), but you can only have one active one at a time?
I'm concerned that a site named "Outdoors" looks, to the casual visitor, more and more like a photo-ID site and less like a site where you can get answers about mountain biking, kayaking, camping, and so on.
1 comment thread
0 comment threads