Is "off-topic" well-defined?

Question

I am new here. I just read a question that was classified as off-topic. It asked about reducing the VSWR of a commercial antenna with an impedance matching network. It seems to me that this is within "electrical engineering".

What is going on here? How exactly is on topic defined? Is there a hard reference definition of on topic somewhere?

Answer 1

No…

What's off-topic or not is hard to define, or rather, it's hard to judge if a question adheres to the guidelines. Sometimes people have different opinions about it, which is why we normally vote on it. It takes five votes to close something as off-topic, unless you're a moderator. A moderator can't actually vote, but must use their "ban-hammer".

What to do

This is not necessary that big of a deal that you make it out to be. In this case a mistake may have been made. It has happened before, it will happen again. A mod was too eager to close, likely had a lot of questions and comments to moderate, and made a quick judgement. Someone might have flagged the question and the moderator trusted the flag.

The "correct" procedure is what you've done here, but with much less drama: Ask for clarifications and correction on meta. The question will probably be reopened.

What happened

Now, here's some speculation. One thing that is not on topic is how to use consumer electronics - and for good reasons. The equipment in question is a plain old consumer radio antenna, "for receiving your favorite sports and news stations".

If you're in a bad mood and in a hurry, the question can easily be read as: "I bought an antenna for my radio, but it's crap, can you electrical-guys make it better for me?"

Now, to me it is clear that the user actually knows what he's talking about, this is not a simple usage question, but I can understand how you can also apply the other reasoning.

Answer 2

If you want to know why these decisions were made, then do some exhaustive searching on the meta.

A lot of these guidelines are built from SE and the way they want the sub-sites to be ran.

The list of what is on topic is here There are also some guidelines on what not to ask And more on how to write a good question

You should attempt to be nice

So yeah, there are rules/guidelines on what can be posted. The moderation community's tolerance for bad questions on a scale of 1-10 is 20 and to nuke anything that looks like a bad question (as soon as it gets voted on, it will most likely be closed). Questions are voted on, so it takes more than one person to close them (diamond mods may close especially bad questions outright). If you feel that the question is still on topic after reading the guidelines, then get it reopened, otherwise fix it and then get it re openend

If you have questions run it by the moderator chat room before posting, if it fly's by the moderators and runs afowl of the moderation system, you can get help on getting the question reopenened

I don't remember the question, antenna questions are acceptable. The question is not on the system anymore so we can't see what it was all about. There are several reasons why a question can be off-topic, so clarify which one it was and post a link to the question or information from it. If I remember right it was very short and didn't properly define the problem so it was closed as unclear, but I could be wrong.

Answer 3

Yeah, that question maybe shouldn't have been closed, but it's also not a great question. The real problem is your understanding of how closing questions works in reality.

There are limited number of canned close reasons. It is possible to do some extra clicking, then clear out some annoying pre-written text, then write a custom message for closing. However, there are real people performing this work, on their own time, while they'd rather be doing something else like answering good questions. Therefore, people will often click on the nearest handy close reason that looks even remotely right (or not).

I vaguely remember seeing this question originally. Here is what I think were my thoughts at the time:

1. No, I'm not going to follow a link. Question level adjusted from 0 to -1.

2. VSWR is not defined. I think he means voltage standing wave ratio, but it's kindof arrogant to assume everyone knows that, -2. This is probably a very common acronym in this particular sub-field, but that doesn't help anyone who might be unsure or is new to the field. It also reduces search hits if someone spells it out. It's just plain lazy. Let's make that -3.

3. Why voltage ratio. These things are usually express in dB. What specific case is there here that makes the voltage ratio more illuminating than the power ratio expressed in dB the usual way? This is going to be a hassle getting the details for a useful answer. Does this guy realize how small a voltage ratio of 1.4 expressed in db actually is? Maybe he's deliberately using these units to make the problem seem bigger? -4 now.

4. He's asking whether a matching network could be used. So wait, does he know what he's doing or not? At first it sounded like he did, but this is now a question at a lower level. If a answer mentions a Smith chart, is it going to be met with a lot more questions? Hmm, the correct answer would simply be "yes". That might be fun if I had more time right now.

5. Now he's asking about which end of the feed line the matching network could go. That's a good question, but the answer will need to get into the impedance of the transmission line, mismatches at each end, and too much theory that will be hard to write in a reasonable answer.

Now keep in mind that it took much longer to explain this thought process than to perform it. I spent maybe 10 seconds on this question and then thought to myself "Nah, I've got better things to do.".

I don't think this question is worthy of being closed, but I'm not going to defend it if it is. It's not that it's off topic, but that it's not a great question. However, explaining all the true reasons would be too much trouble. If I were to close, I'd probably just pick unclear.

If it got closed for some other reason, oh well. The fault is with the OP for not taking some care in asking the question. If he doesn't get the exact feedback about why, then again, oh well. If he'd taken a little more care he wouldn't be in this position. This site isn't a game to see exactly how bad a question you can get away with.

Sometimes I've thought questions should be closed with as little explanation as possible. The message would be "Bad question. Go read the rules.". When they don't know where exactly the line is, they'll be extra careful not to cross it.