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The topic in question is not so far removed from the site's purpose to deem that it's "whatever the most people feel like discussing". You are correct in that

The topic in question is not so far removed from the site's purpose to deem that it's "whatever the most people feel like discussing". You are correct in that somebody must draw some kind of line somewhere in the sand... but I believe that Somebody jumped the gun on this one, as they have on many of my questions to similar websites in the past. I think it's more of an elitist thing. "I know the exact rules better than you know the exact rules." When a user needs to know and abide by every rule of every website on the net, the internet is immediately less interesting.

chc 15y ago
You referred to the number of votes the post got. I was saying that's a red herring. Given a choice between a great question about the theoretical underpinnings and practical applications of a feature in Clojure 1.4 and a picture of a cat in front of a computer, several orders of magnitude more people would vote for the cat than the programming question. This is why getting a lot of votes doesn't really prove relevance. As for "I know the exact rules better than you know the exact rules": I don't see that at all. The rules are pretty simple. Here's a summary — if you follow it, you will not get your question locked: 1. Is it about programming? 2. Is it possible to give an objectively correct answer? 3. Is it stated politely? In the particular case of this question, it doesn't even try to follow #2. It's an interesting question, I agree, but there's no right answer, so it's not a good Stack Overflow question. S:N ratio is extremely important on a site like Stack Overflow (because the people who answer questions well lose interest fast when they can't find good questions to answer, and vice-versa), so it is important to make sure that the site sticks closely to its purpose. Incidentally, this isn't true of Wikipedia. Some of its rules make the site better, but a lot of the rules exist more for their own sake than because not following them would ruin the site (e.g. an article that's just descriptions of Pokemon episodes is pretty useless, but it doesn't make the article on Afghanistan less useful).

chc 15y ago

You referred to the number of votes the post got. I was saying that's a red herring. Given a choice between a great question about the theoretical underpinnings and practical applications of a feature in Clojure 1.4 and a picture of a cat in front of a computer, several orders of magnitude more people would vote for the cat than the programming question. This is why getting a lot of votes doesn't really prove relevance. As for "I know the exact rules better than you know the exact rules": I don't see that at all. The rules are pretty simple. Here's a summary — if you follow it, you will not get your question locked: 1. Is it about programming? 2. Is it possible to give an objectively correct answer? 3. Is it stated politely? In the particular case of this question, it doesn't even try to follow #2. It's an interesting question, I agree, but there's no right answer, so it's not a good Stack Overflow question. S:N ratio is extremely important on a site like Stack Overflow (because the people who answer questions well lose interest fast when they can't find good questions to answer, and vice-versa), so it is important to make sure that the site sticks closely to its purpose. Incidentally, this isn't true of Wikipedia. Some of its rules make the site better, but a lot of the rules exist more for their own sake than because not following them would ruin the site (e.g. an article that's just descriptions of Pokemon episodes is pretty useless, but it doesn't make the article on Afghanistan less useful).