I wonder why the following two questions were treated so differently. One, about finding static maps, Good online sources for historical maps, asked in 2011, was well-received (score 23, not closed)
The other one, How to build historical maps?, which was meant to be an update, since technology and data availability has improved since, was closed.
For me, these questions are asking for almost the same, so I cannot understand why they were treated differently. Could you help?
This site was brand-new in 2011, and was still honestly in the process of figuring out what its scope was and wasn't.
Cut to 2020, and requests for sources are explicitly out of scope. The newer Question is perhaps not a request for sources, but the older one certainly was.
From our Help Center:
It is not about: … Asking for reference material
If you look through the question comments, you will in fact see traffic indicating both that the question was considered off-topic by a quorum worth of users in 2014, and that a decision was made to keep it open anyway due to its utility to this community, but to make it a wiki question (no reputation and no authorship on posts).
Now in the newer Q's case, I'm not 100% sure that topicality test applies. Its asking more how to generate your own historical maps, not for existing ones. It would also be useful enough to everyone here, that I personally would be inclined to leave it open. Perhaps it needs the historiography tag on it.
However, our usual fare is stuff that can be answered by talking about history, and this isn't that, so I'm not surprised others felt it was off-topic.
Going forward I'd suggest one of 2 things with the old question:
or
For the new question: If we chose 1, I'd suggest users go back and look at the new question as a historiography question, and consider if it might in fact actually be in scope from that viewpoint.
If we chose 2, we ought to consider if the second question should get the same treatment, and perhaps if this might become a standard treatment for questions about useful histography research techniques.
The "mores" of this site (and other SE sites) change over time. I was one of the original users in 2011, T.E.D. came about a year later, and several of our most active members joined within the past 2-3 years. I don't remember the sequence of events, but my recollection is that sometime between 2011 and "now," a "request for sources" became off topic, which was not the case in 2011.
What has been done on other sites is to put a "historical lock" on the earlier question so that its current form and answers cannot be altered. The accompanying text is that this question is being preserved because of its historical significance, but is not considered a good, on-topic question today, and should not be considered as an example of such.
This is one of the two things that the current moderators can do to the earlier question. The other is for them to rule that it is "still" on topic, meaning that yours would be too. My preference is for the latter, but others may disagree with me.
