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I asked two questions related with a Bollywood movie, this and this

Both have received close votes with cause "Too Localized". It looks to me that CVers have voted to close because they aren't familiar with the canon.

On any given day, I find many questions on SciFi.SE homepage which are related to a canon I never listened about. Should I start CVing them as "Too Localized"?

How can I judge a question when I don't know anything about its dimension? Or, community is thinking other things like SciFi.SE would never get significant audience from India or Love Story 2050 was never existed for Americans like them (generalize it)?

Is community right to close those questions as "Too Localized" or community is mistaken?

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  • 4
    IMO questions on obscure (relative to the SFF community) works should include WP/IMDb links.
    – coleopterist
    Jun 21, 2013 at 20:12
  • 3
    @coleopterist - agreed. I usually edit those in.
    – DVK-on-Ahch-To
    Jun 22, 2013 at 14:18

1 Answer 1

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Given a complete lack of comments on the second question, the general tone of comments (now deleted) on the first question, and identical CVs (majority of them "Too Localized", I'm tempted to agree that the closers were basically casting completely invalid, and frankly, highly offensive votes based on the fact that the movie is not a Hollywood production.

The language of the movie/work is 100% irrelevant to SciFi.SE. We have had successful questions about non-English works before (I myself asked and answered some Russian language stuff). Ex: [1], [2], [3], [4]

One may agree or disagree with the benefits of adding "Indian" or "Bollywood" tag to help search/categorize such questions (I usually try to edit-in "russian" or "soviet" on relevant questions, personally), but excluding such questions from the site is IMHO completely against both the spirit of SE as well as our official closing rules.

NOTE: while neither of the 2 questions are a shining example of a super great and interesting question, both are perfectly on-topic.

  • One asks: you can use time machine in-universe to achieve your goal in 2 time directions, and the "future" solution seems harder. Why was that choice made? And this is 100% crystal clear from the question, without ANY knowledge of the movie

  • Another asks, how a present-day scientist would have been able to easily fix future technology that he knows nothing about. Perfectly legit, if kind of silly. It's quite plausible to assume that Leonardo DaVinci would be hard pressed to fix a broken iPhone, despite being an engineering genius.

    I could possibly be convinced that the second question has some slim merit of being closed as non-construtive (but that's a high hill to climb, compared to some other completely asinine questions we allow), but it was closed as "Too localized". So were the 2 votes for the first question.

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    I'd say the second is completely off-topic, since the reasoning used to arrive at the question seems to be based on the real world and not the world of the movie, but I otherwise agree with you.
    – Matthew Read
    Jun 21, 2013 at 17:27
  • @MatthewRead - it's one thing to assume future technologies in a Fictional universe. It's another to assume a super-intelligent person able to reverse engineer and fix them. That's just plain implausible in most fictional universes outside of Marvel's super-high-IQ personages. Frankly, I have the same question about Back to the Future - how the HECK did Doc Brown manage to get a hover-vehicle going when he was only in the future for like 1 hour?
    – DVK-on-Ahch-To
    Jun 21, 2013 at 17:30
  • Sure, agreed, but I see no reason to believe from the question that another assumption would be more plausible. Both questions are extremely brief and would benefit from more detail; the latter so much so that it may be part of the reason it was closed as TL (no evidence that anyone else would ever have the same question).
    – Matthew Read
    Jun 21, 2013 at 17:34
  • @MatthewRead - well, my comment above is evidence.
    – DVK-on-Ahch-To
    Jun 21, 2013 at 17:38
  • @Matthew The canon is similar to Star Trek which is extension of real world. BTW, QT is an Android with AI. Such technology wasn't in existence in 2008 from when Dr. Khanna jumped to 2050. Added this to the question..
    – user931
    Jun 21, 2013 at 18:22
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    "Given a complete lack of comments on the second question, and identical CVs, " Not true. I voted to keep the first open and close the second as "Not a real question" on the basis that it was completely unclear prior to the edits and seemed to be asking for discussion.
    – phantom42
    Jun 21, 2013 at 19:15
  • @phantom42 - you were in the minority, it was closed as "Too localized" in the end. As I noted, I could see NC VTC as legitimate, even if I disagree with the judgement. The issue was "Too localized" VTCs common to both Qs
    – DVK-on-Ahch-To
    Jun 21, 2013 at 19:18
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    I didn't see the comments before they were deleted, but "too localized" makes zero sense for either of these questions.
    – Beofett
    Jun 21, 2013 at 19:47
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    @Beofett - "Not English" was the general theme. Quite rudely phrased
    – DVK-on-Ahch-To
    Jun 21, 2013 at 19:50
  • @phantom42 - the question was edited by OP, see if you would consider the new version for reopening pls.
    – DVK-on-Ahch-To
    Jun 21, 2013 at 19:51
  • It's already been re-opened. As it stands now, I feel it's at least a valid, on-topic question. Not necessarily a good one, but that's a whole separate issue.
    – phantom42
    Jun 21, 2013 at 20:18
  • I didn't vote or anything, but I don't see how a question like "how did this person from fiction know how to fix something from the future?" is ever constructive. It's the same reason you can "zoom and enhance" a cell phone picture to show a murderer's face from 20000 yards. Because this is accepted by the layman. There is never going to be an in-universe explanation for a reasonable hole in the plot.
    – Gorchestopher H
    Jun 24, 2013 at 14:02
  • @GorchestopherH - (1) Saying "there is never going to be" is so wrong it's not even worth arguing about. This site is choke full of examples of just such in-universe explanations. (2) The point of the question and answer on meta was NOT whether that one question was constructive or not. It was whether it was Too Localized, which was how it was closed.
    – DVK-on-Ahch-To
    Jun 24, 2013 at 14:05
  • @DVK Correction, there is typically not going to be. For every one example of the ubiquitous plot hole "the user lacked sufficient training" actually not being a plot hole, there are 20 examples of where they are actual plot holes. Where, if you actually sat down and looked at what is required to operate or repair a device, a realistic simulation would generate dramatically poorer results than canonized. The fact that SciFi characters are far luckier than logic would see fit is along the same vein.
    – Gorchestopher H
    Jun 24, 2013 at 14:18

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