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Forgive me for the unclear title; I can't think of any better way to word this question.

Because of this question asking for the easiest boss path through all the Megaman games, it has occurred to me that as long as the question remains on-topic and objective, the topic of the question can become as broad as the person asking wants it to be. They could pose questions asking for the name and properties of every single weapon in Borderlands (17,750,000 weapons as of game release), since there is a finite amount of weapons variations in the game. Should this be allowed? Should we impose limitations on the scope of an objective question?

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  • These seem to be different to me. The asker of the megaman question could feasibly use all the information provided him there as he plays through the series. No one could feasibly get all 17,750,000 weapons in Borderlands. The problem is that feasibility is subjective, which is why this is a comment and not an answer.
    – Invader Skoodge
    Aug 19, 2010 at 19:20
  • The identifying objects in nethack question is one that I consider to have a very broad scope. But then again, look at tzenes' answer to the starcraft 2 races question...
    – Larry Wang
    Aug 19, 2010 at 21:57
  • @Kaestur I actually wrote that answer to mock what a "bad" question that was. At first I thought my initial comment "I could write a Novel" was sufficient, but since no one seemed to understand I figured actually supplying an answer would highlight what a terrible question that was. Sadly, I don't think anyone ever understood my purpose.
    – tzenes
    Aug 25, 2010 at 16:43

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A very important inquiry that I have oft thought about.

For one start, I would generally prefer that anything which is complex would be limited to a single game. And if it must expand past a game, staying within one unit of the series is also important.

It needs to be able to be found by someone looking for it. So as I mentioned in that linked question, I am concerned about addressing someone who only cares about, say, Megaman 2 and wants to know a good boss order. It also encourages a better approach by multiple people suggesting different answers when you are only covering one game. Otherwise, you have to deal with trying to cover all of the games in the scope, or whether you only cover some, how you deal with when you have strategies for one game in one answer and strategies for two games in another... it's messy.

Now in general scenarios...

If one person does compile a huge list of all 17,750,000 weapons and can fit it comfortably in one good answer, what reason to we have to block it?

Remember that a good question will be something that is useful, that will attract upvotes. So even if one could list all 17 million weapons of Borderlands, is having it all in one answer actually going to be useful to someone?

We can't really make an arbitrary judgement on a concrete scope because we would end up denying very valuable information that ends up just over that scope. So we have to make due with a subjective analysis when we're past isolating it to a game (or series). The essence: how useful will it be in a broad scope? Is it necessary to compile all of this data in one post? Will anyone be looking for it in this list? Is the huge list going to be more useful than having separate items for when the actual important components come up? Will a huge list cause interference when people need specific strategies and we start closing as duplicates?

Scope is necessary, but it's basically a judgment call on the question, I say. If you have an overly broad question, just stop and think to yourself how important and useful that information will be.

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