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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?

+8
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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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+6
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I'll borrow one of the points from the existing answer, for voting purposes.

  1. Decide they are off-topic and close the ones we have.

However, I'm also willing to carve out an exception for pictures that the poster has a clear personal connection to and provides meaningful context for and relevant details about and clearly shows that they have tried and failed to answer the question before asking of others to do it.

The problem, as I see it, isn't the occasional question along the lines of "a deceased relative of mine was on a tour through AnArea, SomeCountry in the early 1980s, and took the three pictures below, and now I'm trying to figure out where they were at the time; here's what I know, here's what I have already tried and how that didn't help me (or: how that helped narrow down the possibilities), please help me pinpoint the location as accurately as possible"; but rather the barrage of "pinpoint the location from where the picture below was taken" questions where the user posting them obviously has no personal connection to the scene (it might, for example, be something taken from a book or a movie), shows no evidence of having tried to find the answer before asking of others to do that work and provides very little to no context for the picture.

The latter type of post is highly problematic from a copyright perspective (personal photos are generally also covered by copyright, of course, but in a case such as the example above the copyright holder is probably less likely to sue for copyright infringement); shows a blatant lack of respect for the time of others; and seems to me to be unlikely to provide much, if any, value to others. (It also raises the question of what the person posting the question will even do with the answer, assuming that one is given.)

Dumping half a dozen such questions on the community in a very short amount of time just adds insult to injury. Also, as has unfortunately been the case with a number of such questions, when the person posting them can't even be bothered to restrict each post to what's actually relevant to the specific question, that only serves to reinforce the impression of a lack of respect for others. Continuing to post the same type of question even when many previous, similar ones (by the same user, even) sit fairly heavily downvoted doesn't help either.

Outdoors Codidact should not be a dumping ground for every outdoors photo ever taken or even just published even if one prefixes it with "where was this photo taken?".

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1 comment thread

Totally agree, this is what are policy should be. (2 comments)
Totally agree, this is what are policy should be.
Olin Lathrop‭ wrote almost 3 years ago

This is what I've been trying to say here and there, but were able to state it clearly and in one place. I completely agree. This is what our site policy should be. Perhaps this should be a separate meta post so that it can be unambiguously voted on without all the other tangents in this questions that resulted us finally getting here.

Monica Cellio‭ wrote almost 3 years ago

I agree with this approach. I think voting on it as an answer should give clear-enough indication of community support; while the question and other answers raise a variety of points, this proposed policy is clear and not mingled with other factors.