Proposing to add a custom close reason for rock-identification questions that are lacking in sufficient detail to be useful and answerable

Question

Out of 29 questions closed in the past month, 23 were rock-identification questions. All of them were closed because the asker did not follow this very good guide on how to ask them. Those questions may be perceived to lower the quality of the site, to the degree that they have been proposed to be essentially banned altogether.

We have a boilerplate text that anyone can add as a comment before voting to close a rock-identification question as unclear:

Your question is getting close votes because it has insufficient information. Please read our guide for asking “Identify this rock” questions and [edit] your question. If your question is put on hold but you improve it, the community can vote to reopen it.

To make our life easier, I propose that we add a custom close reason for such questions:

Elsewhere on the network, Graphics Design has a custom close reason that may be used with their font-identification questions:

"Please review our font-identification, critique requests, or style-identification requirements and provide the missing information so that your question is both answerable and useful to others."

(Example use)

I propose that to make our life easier and our site friendlier, we add a custom "close as off-topic" reason on Earth Science as follows:

Please review our rock identification guidelines to provide the missing information so that your question is both answerable and useful to new users.

There is no provision for a custom "closing as unclear" close reason, but we can adapt the how to ask page if we wish.

Answer 1

100% yes.

A perfect next step to addressing the problem, avoiding going to extremes. And really seems to offer hope of solving issues because it makes it more straightforward to close.

Honestly one main reason I tend not to close-vote now on such questions is because I'm concerned people may not understand why it was done. If the issues a question has don't fit well within one of the listed reasoning categories, I'm cautious to close it.

So I see no reasons at all why this change shouldn't be done, and hopefully a quicker close of bad questions can both encourage people to make changes... and perhaps even slightly reduce the clutter.

Answer 2

I totally agree... I fear that a lot of people don't even read the guidelines for rock id. They shoot some badly lit and out of focus pictures with their smartphones and only have in mind that they can clearly see how the rock looks like.

I get several fossil id requests per week, most of them look like the pictures posted here. When I ask the people about the bad image quality, they often answer: "when I look at the fossil, everything is totally clear!"

I can't close vote the mails I get, but closing here would be really helpful for maintaining a good quality of the posts here.

Answer 3

This is no longer relevant. All rock identification questions are now off-topic.

As of 2019-07-30, Rock ID questions are off-topic or Earth Science Stack Exchange. See this meta post for more information.

This decision has followed years of tolerating an increasing number of often poor rock identification questions. We have tried to use a detailed guide, a custom close reason when this guide was not followed, but it did not help to stop the flood of poor rock identification questions. Popular community consensus after multiple requests decided to declare rock identifications questions to be off-topic.