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ATM machine in Las Condes, Santiago Chile this is answered by a trivial Google Maps search. I am grateful for pnuts for actually doing the search, sure but this question ought to be closed for trivial.

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  • A close reason.
    – user4188
    Feb 24, 2017 at 19:51
  • Surely meta.stackexchange.com/tags/specific-question/info with the site name replaced would suffice. When a post is about a specific question (as opposed to say a tag or an incident that has happened) you can tag it with this. Generally "please reopen x" or "why was x closed" get it, but "i think x should have been closed" can too. Of course there is some sort of appeal to general principles, there always is.
    – Kate Gregory
    Feb 26, 2017 at 14:18

4 Answers 4

Reset to default
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My view is that if a truly trivial question can be answered trivially, it takes less time to answer it than to close it (or to move on and focus on a different question; there's no obligation to spend time on questions that displease you for whatever reason). Downvoting is the preferred mechanism for questions that do not "show any research effort."

Some questions may turn out to be less trivial than they first appear, at which point it is useful to have them open so others can add their contributions.

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  • Note, of course, that such questions still could be closed as off-topic if they aren't reasonably travel related. If we had a flood of questions all asking us just to perform simple searches on Google Maps, I could certainly see revisiting this, but as it stands, it doesn't seem like a significant problem.
    – Zach Lipton
    Feb 24, 2017 at 22:16
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    In many many (most, even?) countries, ATMs on Google Maps are incomplete - even for my home town in the UK, Google Maps is missing a few ATMs that have been there for 15+ years. You also can't tell from Google Maps if an ATM accepts international cards/Visa/Mastercard (in some countries this isn't standard). CHX might assume pnuts' answer is complete therefore the question is trivial, but someone who knows Santiago could say "That ATM only takes [X] cards, there's a better one not shown on google maps at [location]"
    – user56reinstatemonica8
    Feb 27, 2017 at 11:02
  • I did your trivial method over here travel.stackexchange.com/questions/87998/… it felt incredibly goofy to be coming out with an answer like that, but I have to assume that the OP found it helpful. Inspect your itinerary... LOL
    – Gayot Fow
    Mar 1, 2017 at 9:07
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It is policy SE-wide to Embrace the non-Googlers. This is all the more obvious when it's not just good old regular Google, but specifically Google Maps, where the trivial answer resides. Perhaps not everyone knows that is a possible search? In our case it might also reside in the memory and camera roll of someone who went through the airport recently, or on the airport web site. No matter. Asked, answered, embraced.

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It might be a good idea to consider what would count as "trivial" before implementing any such close reason. a single, simple query on GMaps has been suggested (and is what triggered this Q), but if so, then how about solutions that can be found with a single, simple query on Timatic (say via SkyTeam), or a single, simple query on Rome2Rio, or a single, simple query of Wikipedia, or Wikitravel, ... - maybe even just reading the tag wiki?

Having the reason might be great but might just be more trouble, if not applied consistently.

And for some Chinese at least, might not GMaps be an issue regarding "simple"?

On further consideration, no, do not add a "trivial" Close reason - at least until "trivial" has been defined.

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I'd close such questions as long as all of two conditions are satisfied:

  1. The question has a direct answer on Google Maps
  2. It only takes a single, simple query on GMaps to find it (in this case it's "ATM Las Condes")

I think this is a strict enough reading to make sure that only the most trivial questions are closed. However if I remember correctly there can only be 5 custom close reasons, so this would have to fit in one of the existing five.

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  • @pnuts no, but I guess we could manually add an "offtopic because..." each time
    – JonathanReez Mod
    Feb 24, 2017 at 19:51

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