Close reason for learning materials

Question

One of the common close reasons we use on Bicycles.SE is "Questions seeking product, service, or learning material recommendations are off-topic because they tend to become obsolete quickly. Instead, describe your situation and the specific problem you're trying to solve."

I'm not sure that closing service or learning material recommendations really fit in with the first one (product recommendations, which do get obsolete quickly). Lots of learning material (Park Tool's guide, various books, etc.) don't go out of date on bicycles, and how to service some things is quite tricky to deal with. Of course, requests for learning material and service material can be too broad, but we have a separate close reason for that.

I think re-wording this close reason to be "Questions seeking product recommendations are off-topic because they tend to become obsolete quickly. Instead, describe your situation and the specific problem you're trying to solve."

Thoughts?

Answer 1

I'm personally in favor of keeping all the recommendation closure reasons wrapped up in a nice, neat package.

While closing those questions as "too broad" would be technically correct, the "too broad" closure is a giant gray area and, as a result, tends to be somewhat arbitrarily applied. This is much the same problem we had when we were closing shopping questions as "primarily opinion based." Specifically naming those things as off-topic helps solves that problem.

It's also nice to have something to which we can point new users when we say, "sorry, but your question doesn't fit our site." The "too broad" and "primarily opinion-based" closure reasons feel a bit arbitrary at first glance. In the interest of growing our community, I think it's best to reserve those for questions that don't fit but it's really hard to nail down something more specific.

It sounds to me like it's the "become obsolete quickly" part that you're really having a problem with. I get that. It really is just inaccurate. If we were going to reword anything, that's the bit I'd recommend changing. Perhaps something like:

Questions seeking product, service, or learning material recommendations are off-topic because they tend to solicit opinionated answers, debate, and spam. Instead, describe your situation and the specific problem you're trying to solve.

This is actually almost identical to how our grandpappy, Stack Overflow, explains their rationale for keeping recommendations off topic. I just added in "debate" because I think that's the crux of the issue.