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Sorry to ask such a basic question. I thought it would be easy to do this, but I really can't find an explicit policy on acceptable subjects for MSE.

If there's no such explicitly written-out policy, then I would like to know about the acceptability of asking about

  1. the history of Mathematica, and in particular, the history/genealogy of the Wolfram language (i.e. where would it fit in the genealogy of programming languages);

  2. getting help locating specific Mathematica-related items in the WRI site.

I would have thought that both these types of questions are well within MSE's scope, but since can't find any tags for them, I'm not so sure anymore (maybe the tags don't exist simply because no one has yet wanted to ask such questions?)

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I feel the best way to proceed is usually to ask a well written question and see how the community responds to it. One that has a concrete example to argue if it needs contention.

  1. I think the first category is on-topic so long as it would not produce answers that are primarily opinion-based as that is one of the extant close reasons.

  2. The second category is probably off-topic as questions should be of lasting value and independent of external resources. If the removal of an item from the WRI site would nullify an answer neither it nor the question (if it is the only/best answer) is a good fit for the goals of Stack Exchange as I understand them.

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  • Gotta love web archives. I suppose a url can still be of value, because for example the entire url wolfram.com/solutions/mathlink can simply be entered as a search on that site to obtain the archive. On the other hand, the lifetime of an answer could be somewhat extended if we link directly to an archive. Commented Jun 20, 2015 at 15:29

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