Improving opening paragraphs of GIS SE Help Center (and Tour)?

Question

Our opening Help page starts with these two paragraphs (some common to its Tour) :

Geographic Information Systems is a question and answer site for people interested in GIS, Remote Sensing, Photogrammetry, Geodesy and Surveying, as well as Programming/Databases specific to the aforementioned. It is built and run by you as part of the Stack Exchange network of Q&A sites. With your help, we are working together to build a library of detailed answers to every question about GIS. Our Help Center provides further guidance to help in posting good questions and answers.

Although the scope of questions appropriate here is wide, befitting the range of GIS applications, please make an initial effort to research the answer before you ask a question. That will help you write a great, focused question that gets excellent answers. Questions that are too basic (meaning the answer is indexed in any number of general internet reference sources designed specifically to find that type of information) will be closed.

This is a page that moderators of the site can edit, and its current wording stems from How should we describe GIS Stack Exchange on its Tour page?

I think the two paragraphs currently serve our community well.

However, with the addition of one word I think it would serve our community even better.

Rather than suggest that word at the outset, I would like to ask whether anyone has any suggestions for slight re-wording of these two paragraphs that they would like to see?

Don't forget that these are only the first two of seven paragraphs on that help page so any suggestions should also stay in context with the remainder.

Answer 1

I would like to drop the last sentence:

Questions that are too basic (meaning the answer is indexed in any number of general internet reference sources designed specifically to find that type of information) will be closed.

I like to consider GIS SE as the ultimate repository for questions all along the spectrum from basic to advanced. Why would we not want GIS SE to be the "internet reference source" for all questions related to GIS? Additionally, I would consider "Too basic" as subjective and difficult to enforce.

Answer 2

My suggestion herein is not what I was originally thinking, but in this sentence:

That will help you write a great, focused question that gets excellent answers.

the word "gets" could be replaced by "attracts" to remind, with subtlety, that askers are seeking volunteered efforts to answer their questions.

This would make that sentence:

That will help you write a great, focused question that attracts excellent answers.

Answer 3

I am using this answer to try to draw all the suggestions into a single post. If it floats to the top we can be confident that it has community support in its entirety. If not, then depending on where it sits, we can try to assess what bits of it have consensus.

Geographic Information Systems is a question and answer site for people interested in GIS, Remote Sensing, Photogrammetry, Geodesy and Surveying, as well as Programming and Databases specific to the aforementioned. It is built and run by you as part of the Stack Exchange network of Q&A sites. With your help, we are working together to build a library of detailed answers to focused questions about GIS. Our Help Center provides further guidance to help in posting good questions and answers.

Although the scope of questions appropriate here is wide, befitting the range of GIS applications, please make an initial effort to research the answer before you ask a question. That will help you write a great, focused question that attracts excellent answers.

Answer 4

I suggest removing the italic formatting in:

as well as Programming/Databases specific to the aforementioned.

It is a bit disrupting. The lack of bold formatting in this part already says Programming/Databases have something different from previous subjects.

_{As alternative, I'd also support to bold formatting the entire sentence (or just bolding 'Programming and Databases').}

Answer 5

The sentence below has concerned me for a while:

With your help, we are working together to build a library of detailed answers to every question about GIS.

I think it implies that we are an "ask anything, any way you like" site. However, we have a number of guidelines throughout our Help and this Meta site, and a number of close reasons, that says to me that we do not seek to answer every conceivable question about GIS.

I think the simple insertion of the word focused in that sentence will bring us much closer to describing the type of GIS questions we seek.

I also like the suggestion of @Midavalo to drop the word "every".

I propose this sentence as a replacement:

With your help, we are working together to build a library of detailed answers to focused questions about GIS.