Are equipment recommendation questions on topic and how should they be presented to be relevant?
There was a brief discussion about recommendations in answers in this topic: What is our view on product recommendations in answers?
Update: This blog post from Jeff Atwood, posted half a year after this question was originally discussed, may add some more considerations to the issue: Q&A is Hard, Let’s Go Shopping!
I think they're typically going to be off topic as too vague or subjective. The conversation usually goes as follows (examples are already on the site):
I think that such questions would be much better if they were recast into things like "what do I need to know about lens A?" or "what's a good lens for genre X?" or "what should I look for buying my first DSLR?" etc. They would elicit much the same information, without the subjective back-and-forth.
The key for me here is that in the vast majority of situations, the particular quirks of the person asking the question are distractors that don't affect the outcome. Most lens decisions have two major criteria: appropriate focal length, and budget. Camera decisions have a few more wrinkles, but still reduce to a small number of criteria rather well.
I'd define relevant product recommendation question this way - if other people gain from these answers, it's on topic, if the question/answer is more like personal consulting, it's off topic.
Examples:
Vote it down or suggest your own answer:)
I think that they're on topic, because a very common question is: What should I buy? Thus, we should serve that need.
Questions that are too vague can be closed for other reasons.
If it develops into a problem, we can revisit. But I don't think we should preemptively react to a problem that may not exist.
And, yet another possibility:
We could have an Camera Recommendations chatroom, and close equipment recommendation questions quickly with a pointer to that.
People with a shopping urge could get quick advice, and it'd be in a more transient medium.
Update:
On reflection about this, I realize that my concern is really something more narrow than the general topic of equipment recommendations. Of course we have a ton of questions in the equipment-recommendation category, and many of them are great, with great answers. It would be crazy to throw that away, and I can relate to anyone who thought I was crazy for suggesting that.
What I'm really concerned with, and what I think tends to towards the problems I'm worried about below, are what specific camera should I buy? questions. These questions don't suit the site well. They're almost always going to be subjective and argumentative (and in the bad-subjective category), and much more time-transient than other recommendation questions.
So that's what I'd like to take a hard line against. Can we encourage good equipment recommendation questions and, gently but firmly close "what camera should I buy?" questions?
I've appreciated this site being relatively free of the brand partisanship that seems to me to almost define some photography web forums. I'm afraid that having more equipment recommendations would bring that out more, and possibly spill to outside of the equipment recommendations.
And even discounting brand wars, it's nice to have a site that focuses more on photography and less on gear. I think shopping recommendations bring that out of balance.
And beyond all that, any QA which is specific enough to be really helpful to an individual is unlikely to be ever useful to someone else. Even if someone with exactly the same needs comes along a year later, everything will be out of date. That just means we'll have a site littered with noise.
Finally, I'm concerned that the majority of people asking the basic what-to-buy questions won't become positive contributors to the site in other ways. There's exceptions, but mostly, once they've got their answer (contributing to the above problems in the process), they're not engaged and won't be in a good position to stay around helping others.
So, my preference is to take a hard line against specific recommendations.
However, I'm all for general recommendations: what do I need to do this kind of shot? And I'm also in favor of the "how do I figure out how to decide" questions, including the more practical "what do I need to know so I can make this choice?".
Basically, I agree with @ex-ms and @labnut's answers here, but wanted to add the above as well.
I believe we should apply Five Tests before answering equipment choice questions.
Will the answer be:
In general, a good answer should have as its aim, to promote the art and science of photography, the mission of the Royal Photographic Society.
A shopping recommendation merely promotes the aims of certain manufacturers.
Questions that ask for shopping recommendations are lazy questions. They shirk the hard work of doing the necessary research and formulating proper questions. They deserve neither help nor sympathy.
As this topic has come up again recently, I think we need to look to the actions of the community at large in response to equipment recommendations. There was no clear consensus in this thread before, however since the end of last year (2010) our community has been happy to oblige people who ask for equipment recommendations. The quality of answers is usually quite good, although we do have the occasional bias here and there. I think the volume of quality answers may be lacking a bit overall, and it might be good to step up the level of response we offer to people asking for clear and specific equipment recommendations. In general, though, I think the actions of the community have spoken quite clearly:
Equipment Recommendation questions are ON TOPIC.
It should be noted that in other discussions, the decision to label speculative discussion about unreleased products as clearly OFF TOPIC.
All information is time sensitive to one degree or another. If someone asks a well written question, and someone else is willing to answer it, and the information is likely to help someone then surely that's good enough.
Take, for example, jinsta's fantastic answer to this question: Decrypting Canon's Nomenclature Of Cameras
Sure, it has no real enduring value because Canon's range is going to change over time. That said, it is a great write up which really helped me understand the differences in Canon's lineup and make an informed choice about which model would be suitable for me - and I'm quite sure others will find it useful for a period of time before it becomes outdated.
You don't build a great community site by seeking to exclude those who don't share the same narrow subset of the common interest as those who happened to find the site first. Tags are a first class feature of Stack Exchange sites - if people aren't interested in a specific topic, such as equipment recommendations, they can ignore that tag and concentrate on those which do interest them, and a more diverse community can grow as a result.
If we do decide to allow equipment recommendations, in contrast to my other answer, I strongly believe we should go all-in. I asked earlier if we should have a separate gear-recommendation site, which I still think might be a good idea. But failing that, if we do allow equipment recommendations here, the rules should be clear, simple, and non-subjective.
