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At one point we want to attract more people to this forum, at the other point there is a very restrictive policy regarding closing question. In my opinion these points are contradictory to each other. I was amazed that this question: Which of these airports is the most interesting for a pilot and this question was not: Whats the deepest underwater tour available

I can think of other questions that are similar in asking and remained open. I really wish travel.SE would allow a broader set of travel related questions.

Compare it to stackoverflow, the mother of all current stackexchange sites. Every type of programming questions are hosted there from prolog, java, c, php, etc.

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    Just a point that we might want to refer to the site as a forum since we're trying hard to differentiate Q & A sites from forums. Dec 6, 2011 at 10:10
  • Since the question was reopened, I edited it a little bit so that it should be clearly answerable now. Dec 6, 2011 at 20:20
  • Travel.SE is considered a forum?
    – user82
    Dec 12, 2011 at 21:12

2 Answers 2

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Mark has already pointed out what reasons I thought of for differences between the underwater tour question and the one on airports. As he said, one has some sort of definitive criteria, the other doesn't. And as he also rightly points out, there are ways to edit the question to make it confirm with guidelines. The other thing that made me close the question was that it was open-ended and essentially asking for list, which may be okay for bicycle renting in European cities but with no end to the discussion when it comes to most beautiful airport.

I do not think we are being too restrictive. StackExchange sites are Q&A sites where we get a platform to provide objective answers to questions. It is a not a forum for general discussion. It's relatively easier to decide on StackOverflow whether a question is subjective or not: you have benchmarks and logical comparisons for even questions like what a 'better' algorithm is. During the beta period of Travel.SE however we must take a stand - as a community - on what is allowed and what is not. We had a community vote on what we wanted our FAQ to be. And it states:

You should only ask practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face. Chatty, open-ended questions diminish the usefulness of our site and push other questions off the front page.

I do wish the site grows and we get more questions per day, I even hope we can hit 1000 questions before the year ends! It must not, however, come at the cost of compromising what an on-scope question is for this site.

Roflcopter is one our most enthusiastic community contributors and has asked some of the most interesting, 'out-there' questions. This closed question was one that should remain in our chatroom, "You Are Here". Hey maybe if we all gave Roflcoptr company there every now and then we can have more lively discussions on questions like this there, yeah? :)

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It's actually fairly clear:

  • we want questions that are objectively answerable.

The underwater tour is easy to identify the correct answer - it needs to be a tour, and the one that is the furthest below the surface of the water wins.

The airport question, on the other hand, is extremely subjective. What defines most interesting? Is it the scenery? The difficulty of landing? The weather?

I believe the airport one could be reopened with some editing - for example, which is the most dangerous landing could probably be researched based on the number of 'incidents' at the airports. Or which one can you see the most mountains, or fly over a city, for example.

Travel on all topics is accepted, but like stackoverflow, it's about finding objective answers, and trying to help questions be shaped to assist in gaining these types of answers.

That's my humble opinion, Ankur closed it so I'd be interested in his views as well.

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    I think the key part which make this question objectively answerable is "for a pilot.", and the fact that he gives a list of choices. As a backseat pilot (or cabin pilot if you like), I am aware of conditions that makes one airstrip more challenging then the other. So I am really interested in the answer to this question if it would come from a pilot.
    – user141
    Dec 6, 2011 at 6:17

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