Updating our "What topics can I ask about here?" help center page to be explicit about what **not** to ask

Question

When recently voting to close an off-topic undergraduate question, I saw this screen: with the phrase:

Questions about problems facing undergraduate students are off-topic unless they can also apply to graduate or post-graduate academicians as described in What topics can I ask about here?

Note, however, that this description is absent from the linked help center page. Nor is it at What types of questions should I avoid asking?. We do note that questions that are very specific to one person's situation are not likely to get very far, but we don't outright discourage questions specific to undergraduates.

Some SE sites explicitly discourage certain off-topic questions. Mathematics has a detailed list: https://math.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic

Can we add a section like this to our help center?

Answer 1

I believe we should revisit this issue, in light of the fact that we have come out of beta and are getting more traffic.

Specifically, I sympathize with new users who post questions about things like undergraduate admissions without realizing it's considered off-topic. I wouldn't understand that from reading the help center text, either.

I also think it would be worthwhile to specify that

• questions for a specific research project (e.g. Examples of Psychology in Finance) are off-topic, and
• questions about Should I attend University X or University Y are off-topic

Although these are clearly off-topic if one reads the help center text carefully, I think we get enough of these that I'd like to exclude them explicitly.

Answer 2

I think this ties directly into the question of how we go about getting more questions per day on the site. We're never going to get out of Beta status unless we get 2-3 times more questions per day (correct me if I'm wrong), and while I am all for having strict guidelines on topic-appropriate questions, we should possibly thinking of some sort of outreach to find more people who want to ask questions that are on topic.

Answer 3

Note that the section you linked to on the Mathematics section is from their "on-topic" page, which we also use to explicitly list what is on-topic for this site. You will note that this list does not include anything related to undergraduate studies.

Historically, the SE folks have been willing to let us define what is on-topic, and discourage changes to the "what's off-topic" list, as anything that's no on-topic is, by definition, off-topic. I can bring it up with the admins again, but I doubt their stance has changed.

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In response to the clarification below, I still maintain my above position. We list what should be asked, with the implicit (if not explicit) statement that anything not on-topic is off-topic. My view is that adding more text to the FAQ will not solve problems; people who post off-topic questions will not be deterred because "it's not in the FAQ".

Basically, I feel that listing off-topic stuff may make us feel good, but it decreases FAQ readability (more text) and won't affect the number of off-topic questions.