I recently asked a question about the origin of the term 'buff' and received a comment saying:
This question appears to be off-topic because it is about historical trivia about the origin of a word.
I also read an almost identical question asking about the origin of 'noob', which has not been closed as off-topic.
After reading over the "How to ask" pages and found nothing relating to these types of questions being off-topic.
Are these questions off-topic?
In general: no, it's not a prohibited category or something, it's a question about video games, and we allow those. Furthermore, your question hasn't been closed.
However: it has had a close vote cast in it's direction, because it falls along one of several fault lines in the community that makes it pretty borderline. Questions not terribly unlike yours often require closure for a whole host of other reasons (because remember, Off-Topic is but one of many), and suffer from other quality issues which are not the result of a categorical flaw of the subject matter.
Tl;dr don't sweat one close vote. People get things wrong regularly.
apologies for making most of this an answer ebing a reply to some comments but it was far too long for a comment and i was not willing to making 5+ comments in a row given the wait time in between comments.
Firstly, i do believe Historical Trivia Question are on-topic so long as it still relates to gaming, after all, anything on the nintendo-64 will become Historical Trivia, anything on the nes probably already is Historical Trivia, after all, what doe Nes stand for? would be on topic 50 year from now wouldn't it (provided it wasn't a duplicate).
All knowledge becomes historical as time goes by, to say that all Historical Trivia is off-topic is to say "we wont answer anything about the history which has made us what we are today" and what may have little importance to some may be of great importance to others
@Frank I disagree that there is nothing at all that benefits from asking the origin of a word when it's about gaming, otherwise you have to say that someone asking where "roguelike" originates from is off topic aswell. while it may be Historical trivia later on down the track (if it isn't already) it's foolish and blind to deny that knowing where it originates from is in any not beneficial, i doubt you can explain what "rougelike" mean without explaining it's origins.
While in the linked question "Buff" isn't a gaming unique term touching on it's origins helps in understanding how it's meaning is then conveyed to the term we know in gaming. look at BammaHamma's Answer and the English.SE answer we see where it originated from, how it's meaning has altered/been appended though history and how we can logically see why it is used in gaming in the way BammaHamma described.
Could you answer why L.A Noir is named as it is without explaining where the term Film-Noir originates from which would also include it's meaning?
Good answers always regurgitate what's already been said elsewhere weather it's the internet, books, tv series, any other midea, it's called citing your sources/evidence when providing a factual answer, it makes an answer better, otherwise you making s*** up.
Paul on Modern Family says "W.T.F, Why the Face" when i was brought up thinking "WTF = What The F***". While not about gaming if someone wasn't brought up like me and saw this, they would take WTF as Why The Face, they see it everywhere else and think it is from Modern Family the term originates from, they see a friend down the street depressed and in a chat room or text says "i saw u today, wtf?" and the recipient, knowing that WTF = What the F*** misreads it.
Without knowing the origin they can't grasp the meaning as such this breeds misconception and confusion, if given the argument of which is correct i'm going to regurgitate what's already been said elsewhere in order to prove my point.
you've regurgitate what's already been said elsewhere here by changing
A pregnant cow will stay inside your barn for 20 days, and the baby cow will have half the friendship hearts as its mother
to
it will take 20 days to give birth to a calf. It will have half the hearts of the mother.
ofcause, if by regurgitate what's already been said elsewhere you mean blanket copy and paste jobs these are going to be shadowed by more impressive answers, hell, i tend to down vote said answers especially if citation markers are left in cause this shows a clear lack of research and understanding of the person's own answer.
Historical trivia is one of the 3 biggest topics where people here often have completely different opinions (The others being Lore Questions and technical-issues).
The thing with these questions: While they are not explicitly off-topic (Lore Questions even being mentioned in the FAQ as on-topic), they often bring up a lot of discussion.
If you search for "Historical Trivia" on meta, you can see that the community opinion tends to be rather on than off topic (not by much though).
As with lore or tech questions: you can ask them here but you should expect down or even close votes. While I personally don't have a problem with these questions per se, I can see some negative aspects: They don't actively help a problem, it's often hard to ask a "good" question and as in your question; sometimes these questions are better asked on another SE site or even on a completely other site.
But then again: A lot of questions that fall under the category of historical trivia can be answered correctly by an expert. A thing that is also noticeable with these questions is that most of the time the questions are downvoted and sometimes closed while the answers have a pretty high upvote count in general. This kind of proves for me that these questions are not always bad. They lead to good answers and while as already mentioned they don't help with an active problem they can still be interesting and answerable by an expert (But we are no linguistic experts. So please ask questions about origins of words on the respective other sites).
The main issue I have is that @LessPop's answer does nothing to actually argue that they're on-topic. It just says, "They are, because they are." When our previous meta that governed these questions was this one, I believe, which says that they're actually not.
We've already got a close reason for identifying a game based on which was first to use a mechanic. But if we're now allowing questions about historical trivia, we're starting to show some inconsistencies in our policies, and we need to clear up what is and what isn't allowed.
Think about it. I'm going to use our latest historical trivia question as an example. We have two questions:
When you boil it down, these two questions are going to give the same answer. But as our current policy stands, the first is on-topic, while the second is not. We're going to get an answer that attempts to answer it by pointing at the earliest game that used the system. Never mind that there's not much in the way of proof, and there's no way to answer this definitively at all. It's basically going to be the earliest game someone can find that matches the criteria, until we find an earlier one. I think that's why they were off-topic to begin with; lack of proof, lack of authoritive answers, and most important to me: incidental expertise. Answering these questions requires a skillset outside of what can be expected, and is generally a, "Google this for me" kind of question.
But regardless of my feelings on the problematic nature of these questions, we need to come up with something that properly defines the scope of historical trivia allowable. Because right now, on or off topic-ness is being defined by whether or not you ask for a game or not. Is this the criteria we really want to use? We're going to allow questions that don't ask for a game, on a gaming website? I'm not sure what or how we can really answer this, and my personal bent has been to disallow them.
But let's set some consistent criteria for this, shall we?
historical triviaortermsor such. i mean its still gaming after all right?