privilege for “shopping” questions?

Question

At the moment, sourcing (shopping) questions are discouraged at Electrical Engineering. Many shopping questions are of low quality. For example, the author didn't do enough web searching.

On the other hand, some sourcing questions make good forum content:

• O.P. posts his research/homework. E.g. "I could only find these, but they don't quite fit the bill, because [...]"

• Sourcing is very important for those who do hands-on work. If somebody doesn't have the right stuff, they get stuck.

• Sometimes, the sought item is antique, exotic, or non-existent. Such items are difficult to look for and peoples' opinions help a lot. EDIT: Besides, sourcing questions of this particular subspecies have a tendency to evolve into more academic discussions. E.g., what had superseded an antique, why it doesn't exist, and so on.

• EDIT: Sourcing questions can make good wikis. For example: aggregate list of electronics suppliers.

My point: If we make a privilege for shopping questions, we can encourage high quality sourcing questions.

P.S. Sourcing questions are not at all discouraged on major electrical engineering forums (such as: edaboard.com, forum.allaboutcircuits.com, dutchforce.com).

Answer 1

There is no prohibition against "shopping questions". Questions about buying components are not inherently off-topic.

The prohibition is against questions which are too localized to be useful to a wide variety of readers, or too subjective to get a single definitive answer. Some "shopping questions" violate these rules, others don't.

Answer 2

I understand that abusing of shopping questions might degrade the site, but some shopping questions could be very useful to many of us, because they could convey new technical capabilities and therefore new ideas to do the same or new things.

I would vote to have shopping recommendations allowed.

Answer 3

We don't ban shopping questions because they're low quality, we ban them because they don't fit our site. They're localized, subjective, and not real educational questions.

You wrote:

On the other hand, some sourcing questions make good forum content ... Sourcing questions are not at all discouraged on major electrical engineering forums (such as: edaboard.com, forum.allaboutcircuits.com, dutchforce.com).

Electrical Engineering is not a forum, we're a Q&A site aiming to develop a corpus of quality information. On the fora you've listed, the archive is nearly useless because of the incredible quantity of obsolete, unreviewed, localized and/or just plain wrong content. On Stack Exchange, we work to develop a quality archive. We don't even call it an archive, because it doesn't need to be archived!

Good content on a forum does not always make good content on Stack Exchange.

You seem to be under the impression that the Stack Exchange sites and the community which participate in them are a public resource of which you can avail yourself on whatever question you might have. That is false. Stack Exchange is a carefully developed private web application, with a well-ordered community, publishing thoroughly curated content. The content which we permit here is carefully scoped to ensure that the resulting Q&A is valuable to the global audience of the internet. We've decided that shopping questions do not fit this criteria, and it's worked well so far.

To support this claim, I offer some statistics: This site has had 40-60 questions and answers per day for the past few weeks. This would indicate that there were somewhere between 60 and a couple hundred visits per day, if people simply wanted to get an answer and move on (assuming that answerers can't answer all the questions they visit). Instead, the site analytics show that there are some 10,000 visits per day! These statistics clearly indicate that the content we're producing is useful to more than just the people asking a question and moving on.