Are localized questions off-topic?

Question

I've had a comment left at What is the most useful and practical project management qualification for an IT professional in the UK? stating that the question is too localized and I should check the FAQ for what questions are on-topic. As far as I can tell, the FAQ doesn't say anything about localization - am I missing something?

Answer 1

Hi Andrew,

I apologize, the FAQ doesn't actually list this as a guideline; however, the flagging system and close vote system does. Here is one of the options that you'll see once you earn the privilege to flag questions:

Too Localized: This question would only be 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.

In this case, your question specifically limits answers to the boundaries of the UK, which significantly restricts participation by the worldwide community. Not only would your question limit participation by users, but the actual content would only be useful to a specific subset of Internet users who also happen to be interested in Project Management. That's not very many people, compared to the amount of coverage of some of our other questions.

Thus, the question has less value to our site than it would if it targeted the global community.

With that said, I really think you composed a well-written question and encourage you to continue to participate on our site. We need people who can contribute great content, ask great questions, and share their expertise with the community.

If your question does get closed, which may still happen, the answers will still be there for others to find, which will still benefit you and anyone else who happens to find it, but the [closed] flag appended to it will serve as a signpost to help remind other users that questions about specific, geographic areas are considered off-topic.

What some users have done, especially our high rep users, is they'll edit their question so that it's more on topic, perhaps by removing the geographic components. In this case, since there are already answers, this may make the answers wrong.

Here is an example of a question that was closed for being an exact duplicate of another question on the site: Strategies for Managing vs. Completing Tasks as a Project Manager

Thanks again for participating!