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How to get the centroid of a geographical region? (or: the center of mass of Croatia is in Bosnia and Herzegovina, but where exactly?) was closed as duplicate. It is not. The alleged duplicate is doing the computation on a map (2D) surface. This question is about doing the computation of the earth surface (3D). The methodology is somewhat different.

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  • Rightfully so, the question doesn't reference the duplicate to highlight the differences. The community did the right thing, the question need improvement to explain why the other Q&A are not sufficient.
    – rhermans
    Commented Apr 13, 2023 at 5:34
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    I see, it's the questioner's fault‽ It's necessary for questioner to put a blunt disclaimer at the very beginning of the question to explain why the question is unique and has rightfully deserves to be answered.
    – anon
    Commented Apr 13, 2023 at 5:43
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    I find this whole "delete because duplicate" thing a bit odd. Often the two posts are separated by years, and it's not unreasonable to expect there to be new or improved solutions after such a span. I'm inferring that there is some desire for this site to be "clean". The community seems to want there to be a single canonical solution for a given question. I think that's just weird. This isn't anything at all like an encyclopedia with well-organized entries--duplication isn't the worst quality issue we have. Who cares if there are multiple similar solutions?
    – lericr
    Commented Apr 13, 2023 at 6:07
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    Seeing a solution presented slightly differently might make things "click" for someone. And often the duplicates are actually quite different in significant ways. It would be cool if we could merge things, but in the absence of that, what point is there to deleting duplicates? I'm in favor of deleting entries that are so bad as to be unhelpful or counter-productive. And every once in awhile a duplicate is so, well, duplicative, that I agree with deleting it. But I think we're way over-indexing on that characteristic. And in the present example, I think deleting was actually a disservice.
    – lericr
    Commented Apr 13, 2023 at 6:08
  • People come here hoping to explore a shared interest, but we all end up with this burden of "better do a search before joining the conversation". The question-askers are expected to search before their question is deemed worthy, and the would-be question-answerers are expected to find duplicates if they exist. And they sometimes use it as a bit of a bludgeon to train (or shame) the new questioner. If someone is aware of a nice answer that already exists, sure, it's great to link to it. But deleting the question just seems unnecessary.
    – lericr
    Commented Apr 13, 2023 at 6:20
  • @Leric I have 50+ years help-desk. Yes, seeing the issue done several ways often helped my users see "what the actual problem was" and what the algorithms that solve those problems are. I often am given a code golf answer thai I break apart to learn how it actually works. So show effective ways to find actual duplicates.
    – anon
    Commented Apr 13, 2023 at 6:52
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    @lericr I think it is important to stress that "delete as duplicate" is not a thing - questions are only "closed as duplicate", which preserves the new question and simply links to the old question & answers (thereby giving more potential ways to find the answer to a question that can be phrased multiple ways). And as with most closings, it is implicitly understood that the question can be amended to clarify why it should not have been closed, and the question can then be reopened if deemed appropriate by the community
    – Lukas Lang
    Commented Apr 13, 2023 at 14:18
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    Yes, @LukasLang, I understand that, and maybe I shouldn't have glossed over the details. But this kind of makes my point exactly. The "close as duplicate" doesn't do anything other than make it hard to interact with that closed question and make the poster feel like they've been censored. That new users get their feelings hurt over closings isn't a particularly important concern of mine. I think people will eventually get the hang of how things work and stop taking it personally. But it is just so gratuitous.
    – lericr
    Commented Apr 13, 2023 at 14:28
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    The "closed as duplicate" ceremony, taken along with other ceremonies, make it seem like this site is supposed to be a static repository of curated questions/solutions. I just find that an odd objective. Why not make the site a living, collaborative, provide-help-in-real-time type of site? Why make it feel "wrong" to ask a question that's already been asked?
    – lericr
    Commented Apr 13, 2023 at 14:38
  • If I were to design the site, I'd do almost exactly the opposite. Questions/answers would be automatically deleted (or archived or deprioritized) after a period of time unless they were tagged by the community as quintessential. The irony here is that closing questions as duplicates discourages conversation about exactly those questions that arise repeatedly. We immortalize highly specialized questions that have virtually no chance of being useful to anyone in the future. And we immortalize rather bad questions just because they weren't quite bad enough to get enough close votes.
    – lericr
    Commented Apr 13, 2023 at 14:45
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    @lericr Creating a repository of canonical Q&As is exactly the goal of StackExchange. It's not designed as a typical forum with back-and-forth interactions for this reason, and encourages questions that are useful to others as well (see also closing reasons such as "too specific") - that is my understanding at least. Whether one agrees with that goal is of course a different question...
    – Lukas Lang
    Commented Apr 13, 2023 at 14:59
  • Well, that provides some confirmation for my suspicions. I'm just offering my opinion that (1) it's a sort of foolish objective and (2) it's not being well executed. If the community truly wants quintenssential entries in it's encyclopedia of q&a, then it should be putting much more effort into cleaning up those entries.
    – lericr
    Commented Apr 13, 2023 at 15:51
  • I'm here just doing my own thing, and I actually am not as invested in this close-as-duplicate issue as my excessive commenting might suggest. So, in some sense, it's all good. I'm just bemused by the little cultural idiosyncracies that have cropped up and the post-hoc justifications.
    – lericr
    Commented Apr 13, 2023 at 15:55
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    Probably you are after a different site. You are against a broad consensus of a reasonably large community who prefer curated high-density information, and rejects verbose rants, duplicates, and chatty comments. This is not redit, yahoo, answers, or quora. The culture here is different.
    – rhermans
    Commented Apr 13, 2023 at 16:22
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    @rhermans Oh please. I'm not "against" the community. I'm just offering some mild criticism and expressing my own opinion. Or does the meta site also have conclave-ish rules that I'm now violating? I'm not on the wrong site. I'm aware of my options. I'm quite content here, and I'm quite content on other sites as well.
    – lericr
    Commented Apr 13, 2023 at 17:21

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