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More than half of the questions on OpenData are questions, so I think it is time to think a bit more about:

  1. How would the ideal question look like?
  2. What are the minimum things that a question must have?
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The ideal data request

  1. Data: Explain exactly what data you are looking for. Put a Wikipedia link under each ambiguous word or abbreviation, as abbreviations can have a different meaning in different fields.
  2. Context: What are you actually trying to achieve, what is your final goal that the data will help you get done?
  3. Region: Not everybody is in the USA. Say what country/region your question applies to, if applicable. Some questions do not need a region, for instance questions about chemistry or astronomy. If you want data that covers the whole globe, say it explicitly as well.
  4. License: Say what licenses are acceptable, and whether you are ready to invest money on it or not.
  5. Format: Say what numeric units and data/file format you want, if you have a preference. Say whether screen-scraping answers are acceptable or not.
  6. Authority: What kind of organization do you want the data to come from? Government-issued data only? Peer-reviewed data only? Is crowdsourced data OK?
  7. Requirements: List all other requirements you have.
  8. Non-answers: If you have tried a few obvious candidates before (or while) asking the question but they don't fit, then explain why. For instance, if you are looking for an encyclopedia but Wikipedia is not a valid answer, then explain why. This will provide more clues to what you are looking for.

See a full example question.

The minimal data request

  1. Data: Explain exactly what data you are looking for.
  2. Context: Optional, but it might prevent us from helping you or making the question more useful. Questions with context are also often more understandable.
  3. Region: Strongly recommended. If not specified, be prepared to accept answers that only apply to Pakistan or Botswana.
  4. License: Optional, we will assume you want open data.
  5. Format: Optional, but then be prepared to accept answers in esoteric formats.
  6. Authority: Optional, we will assume that you are ready to accept answers from potentially unreliable sources if no other source seems to exist.
  7. Requirements: Optional.
  8. Non-answers: Strongly recommended. At least show that you have searched for a solution and explain what is wrong with the solutions you have found so far.

Anything I forgot?

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  • I think this is good (and now I understand more about what you're doing on the main site.) If we're going to lay it out like this, I would also wonder if there's a respectful but decisive way to ask people not to merely post "wishes" -- many of the data requests are for things which will never be open data, or which would require Wikipedia/OSM class efforts to gather. Commented Mar 24, 2015 at 12:25
  • @JoeGermuska: I believe that even difficult-to-fulfil data requests are interesting. Imagine that OSM does not exist, and someone asks for it: Thanks to search engines, OpenData will be the gathering point of people looking for this data, and together they might start the collaboration. Quite a few new datasets were actually created as a direct consequence of the question being posted here, and hopefully it is only the beginning :-) Commented Mar 24, 2015 at 14:45
  • @NicolasRaoul Sometimes, yes. But I don't think that's the same as saying that all data requests are equally valuable, and I think there's a real problem with having the unanswered question queue cluttered with essentially unanswerable questions. This meta-question is a great start towards giving guidance for asking better questions. Commented Mar 24, 2015 at 16:20
  • @JoeGermuska: Look at softwarerecs.stackexchange.com 58% of unanswered question is perfectly livable, the community over there does not consider it as a problem: it is natural that most software just does not exist yet. Commented Mar 25, 2015 at 3:00
  • Not looking for the last word, but just because that site exists does not persuade me that ours should work that way. I would find that site unuseful for the same reasons I think that certain kinds of data request questions are needless clutter on the Open Data SE. Commented Mar 25, 2015 at 16:48
  • should we make this information available through the FAQ? Would be very useful to point new user to this information before they ask their questions. Commented Apr 29, 2015 at 12:49

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