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In roughly the last three weeks, we've seen (from oldest to newest):

Numbers after each post indicate the (Score | Popularity) where Score is upvotes minus downvotes (if any) and Popularity is the sum of scores for all posts for that question (question + answers).

A quick eyeball shows that there is varied interest in code improvements (or that it might be very question-dependent).

My all-encompassing slew of two questions:

  • Would these type of posts benefit from a specific tag, as suggested in comments? Or perhaps ?
  • If not, is the motivation that these type of questions fall under the Too Localized banner (as per the close description: "This question is unlikely to help any future visitors; it is only relevant to a small geographic area, a specific moment in time, or an extraordinarily narrow situation that is not generally applicable to the worldwide audience of the Internet.")

Your opinions are appreciated.


I fully appreciate that one cannot define rigid rules for treating questions like these, and that the community should consider each on their own merit. I've upvoted some of them, while my more recent decision to close as TL seemed to be met with some resistance. Indeed, the community decides what goes and doesn't.

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    These are all from the same asker, aren't they? May 8, 2013 at 2:18
  • @MatthewLeingang: Yes, and mostly the same person(s) who answer.
    – Werner Mod
    May 8, 2013 at 14:05
  • Yes to both questions. Yes, they would be too localized as they do not help any future visitors. And yes, a tag would be helpful because it can be put on the Ignored Tags list for all those who tend more towards the first Yes. May 8, 2013 at 15:36
  • I think that those questions may be a undesirable side-effect of the reputation system. The OP knows that such graphics-related questions (and their answers) are popular on the site and that s/he will reap easy reputation from them. As I don't want to encourage that kind of practice, I will refrain from answering such questions, from now on.
    – jub0bs
    May 9, 2013 at 14:08
  • Even though it falls into this category IMO It's well written Q to benefit all Code improvement and suggestions in template May 10, 2013 at 23:36
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    I agree with having a tag, but if they were using tikz I'd actually be interested in them so I don't think closing them as TL is a good idea. May 18, 2013 at 22:45

2 Answers 2

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In my opinion the tag is absolutely necessary. I feel those questions are not meant to help the whole community to learn TeX, but only the OP. I don't have anything against that per se, but it's clearly a different objective and each potential answerer should be able to knowingly choose what they want to spend their time on.
With a specific tag, I think the need to close these type of questions disappears.
Without a tag, I would vote to close as I doubt these questions will benefit anybody else in the future (it's similar in my mind to most compilation issue questions: we help as best as we can, but we usually close the question).

But I wouldn't migrate the question to Code Review.sx. As there is very little chance that anyone there can solve those questions better than here (or can solve them at all), it feels a bit like a way to bury the issue...

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Yes, a tag would be nice. We could also migrate such questions to Code Review.sx - it already has a TeX tag.

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    code-review is a good idea. But I don't feel that migration is necessary. All the best TeX code reviewers on SE are here already, and it's not like TeX.sx gets too much traffic. May 8, 2013 at 2:17
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    @MatthewLeingang I don’t think that “Site X is where the best people for Y are so Y is on-topic for X” is the Stack Exchange way of reasoning, so I would indeed propose migrating these questions, and encourage regular askers of such questions to ask their questions over there.
    – doncherry
    May 8, 2013 at 15:45
  • @doncherry: SE allows for overlapping topics between sites; since the questions are on-topic on both sites, they can but don't have to be migrated. May 8, 2013 at 15:54
  • @MartinSchröder This is sort of an interesting case, because the reason for migration would not be the that the question is off-topic, but that it’s too localized here, but not on CR.
    – doncherry
    May 8, 2013 at 16:01
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    @doncherry: We don't have to, but IMHO we should migrate such questions. Also CR.SX needs more questions. :-) May 8, 2013 at 16:06
  • @MartinSchröder I agree, but wouldn’t that be an indication that we shouldn’t have a tag for these questions? In order for a question to be migrated, afaik, it has to be closed as off-topic. Also, we’re not gonna get a migration path (accessible to non-mods) as long as CR is in beta. Any idea when it’ll grow up?
    – doncherry
    May 8, 2013 at 16:13

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