Would question asking about using the code of a research project be on-topic?

Question

Here is the draft of my question:

The WE1S (WhatEvery1Says) project is so resourceful and well documented that I really want to use it. Unfortunately, I still don't know where is the repo that the Workspace documentation referring to? I search for the new_project.ipynb file in the whole organization and yet the string only appears in the doc repo. I asked on both their GitHub, Facebook page and Twitter, but yet received a reply.

Would this question be on-topic?

• No, because questions about the content of research and coursework rather than the processes of researching, teaching, and learning are off-topic?
• Yes, because questions asking technical issues on academic services are on-topic?

Now, you may argue that this project is not a service, but if you spend some time to read about the project, you will see that it tries really hard to serve people. I must say that I'm very impressed on its effort to make tools, documentations and reports for others to use. And even if you still classify this project as a research, then I can make an argument that asking about the tools it used is more about the processes of researching, not the content of research.

_{Though I'm not completely convinced that "processes of researching" includes tools of researching. It's more about the interactions with the people and institutions}

Answer 1

To me this seems like it's essentially a Python framework and so it would be off-topic here. By the same logic, it seems like it should be on topic at a number of different stacks, including StackOverflow, though I can make no guarantees.

Even if it's arguably not off-topic here, I suspect it would be poorly-received. Only a tiny fraction of our users follow the latest Python frameworks, so the odds that someone here writes a useful answer seem very low.

Finally, I should register my amusement at the way this package is "so resourceful and well documented" that you can't find the equivalent of the on button, and it "tries really hard to serve people" but they have been completely unresponsive after you pinged them on three different channels.

Answer 2

This is a slightly weird one to me. You're not really looking to ask a technical python question, nor one about the content of research itself. Instead, you're asking about the structure of a given software tool, or about locating certain files within it or for it. I am rather ambivalent to whether that is on- or off-topic.

In a comment you write:

any technical issue should be on-topic here as long as it's an academic service. So our focus should not be "it's a technical issue", but "is it an academic service?"

That is inconsistent with practice. Quite a few questions about Google Scholar, for example, end up closed with a comment to the effect that "we're not Google's help desk".

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Anyway, if you're truly just looking for the new_project.ipynb file, per WE1S' Research Tools Overview, it seems to exist in a Zenodo deposit and (currently!) also in the we1s-templates GitHub repo. (Seems you already noticed the Zenodo repo.)

Answer 3

I would look to close this question, because you are asking for technical support for a specialist tool - hence the only sensible answer is to ask in a tool-specific venue (which I realise you have tried)