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I write "Where can I find" in the question bar, and a lot of questions come up. Nearly all of them should be offtopic. Yet nearly all of them appear to have good value to aviation.

I can understand why something that can be easily googled may not be appreciated on SE, but if you want reliable, authentic sources, google may not always do it.

And when people ask for resource location on safety material, it seems to me that they should get a better answer than "closed as off-topic". This is, after all, aviation.

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I agree that some can be useful questions but the majority tend to be one of:

  1. "What is the best....." - probably subjective, and not the good type of subjective.

  2. "Where can I find...." - the location often does change over time, rendering any answer useless.

  3. "Where can I get a feed of data on...." - possibly the least problematic, but there are plenty of data aggregators out there which you can use to find feed data.

So we generally chose to disallow the broad range of resource locations questions. That there might be some old ones which have not been closed just means they may have come before the community decided to disallow them, or have not been noticed. Feel free to flag them.

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  • $\begingroup$ I mean, see, we could make some exceptions. Of course, someone looking for flight tracking does not have ask on SE - nor does the "what is the best book to learn about aviation" guy. But "where can I find XYZ procedure"......sounds too relevant to just dismiss........ $\endgroup$
    – Abdullah
    Sep 21, 2020 at 10:40
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    $\begingroup$ @Abdullah do you have any examples of ones you think should remain open that have actually been closed? Also procedure docs do tend to move around on the relevant authority's sites.... so were probably not the best place to catalogue where to find them. See point 2 above $\endgroup$
    – Jamiec Mod
    Sep 21, 2020 at 10:50
  • $\begingroup$ "Where can I find..." is a good question, it is the answers that need monitoring. A specific URL is a poor answer because URLs change especially with revision of the underlying material. However a text description of how to find the info would not be a problem at all, ie instructions to look within a specific department of the FAA or section of federal regulations and suggested keywords. $\endgroup$
    – Max Power
    Sep 23, 2020 at 1:04
  • $\begingroup$ @MaxPower you could be right, but regulating people not posting a URL is the tough bit. Naturally people want to post a link to it, and that link changes, and then you have a once good but now bad answer (a broken window) $\endgroup$
    – Jamiec Mod
    Sep 23, 2020 at 7:05

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