There is a category of questions on this site that seriously pollutes our scope. Taking these questions to their logical maximum (which I see us continually approaching) everything under the sun has become on topic.
This category is campaign research. Appending historical-settings, campaign-development, or the sentence "this is for research on my campaign" seems to give a user carte blanc to ask whatever historical, geographical or technological question they choose, all in the name of "campaign research" with no barrier to entry of relevance or mechanics, or even any real bearing on the RP experience of the group.
Most of these questions could be asked on a history or nature site with little change in wording and be completely on topic. They are hardly relevant specifically to RP and are likely largely irrelevant to actual play.
What purpose do they serve here?
I realize there are numerous games that are set in historical time periods, but are your players clamoring so desperately for accuracy that you have to have it exactly right? And both historical-settings and campaign-research have some great questions in them. But a lot of the questions in both of those tags have very little to do with RPGs in any specific sense and a lot more to do with history in the general sense.
Part of the problem is that they are often way to broad to begin with. Trying to get a general sense of an entire decade for a CoC game in one question is probably a little much, wouldn't it be much better to hit up Wikipedia or another primary source to find out what kind of events and tech were there? We aren't here to be your research assistant.
Medieval travel times might be useful in certain settings, but again, can't you research how fast you can walk, ride a horse, sail an old boat?
Last but not least. Since this was last discussed site wide nearly 2 years ago, an SE for history has entered beta, it seems to me, that if these folks were willing to answer questions about ancient (and more modern) history it might serve as a better home for many of these questions. And quite frankly, if they consider questions like the ones we have not-constructive or off-topic, that should be a strong indication that we should go that direction.
The purpose of this question is to reopen the discussion from Are campaign research questions on topic? [2010] now that 2 years have passed and we have graduated.
