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Following this comment, do we want questions to be general, and helpful to as many people as possible, or do we want to also allow more specific questions that help smaller groups of people?

I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it's to do with a specific licensing problem. We're looking for questions that can be applied to a more general audience

Where should we draw the line?

4 Answers 4

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Do we want to allow specific questions?

Not just 'yes', but… helllll yes!

See my answer on Is 'too specialized' a reason to close vote?

As I replied to the comment earlier:

You might be confusing this with the "too localized" issue (now gone). But it is actually quite the opposite — SE thrives on asking very specific questions. Issues requiring specific knowledge or "specialized expertise" are what make these sites work. When a site fills with easy or overly generalized questions that have been asked hundreds of times on every other site on the subject, you might as well read Wikipedia. Please don't close questions because they are not generally applicable to everyone. That is not what Stack Exchange is about.

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  • Lovely. That's all I have to say :D
    – Zizouz212
    Jun 29, 2015 at 15:49
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The purpose of this website is to help answer questions that people cant just google. If we don't allow specific questions what is the point of having people here to answer the questions?

I know this is very opinion based. But I feel this is the philosophy stack exchange is based off of.

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This is strange, it [the close reason] seems to defy what Stack Exchange is all about. Part of the private beta is to put high level question to help set a quality standard for later on.

If a question is on-topic, then it's perfectly fine! We can deal with specifics. If people closed like this on Stack Overflow, it wouldn't be a success.

I must agree however, the question is strange. It seems to be based on an entirely historical context, and having not had any question like it of the sort, I can understand the reaction of the community. It feels broad.

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  • I'm asking about specific questions in general (I know there may be other reasons to close the question that the comment was referring to). Jun 27, 2015 at 0:48
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I believe we will have to allow such questions, because otherwise we will run out of questions sooner or later.

There are only so many questions you can ask about the fundamental aspects of free software, so to keep the site alive we will have to allow questions about specific cases.

Regarding this case in particular, I can not understand how the author of the comment comes to the conclusion that this question is too specific. The question is a very general situation which applies to a lot of products. It is not specific at all.

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