Recently, two questions on urban exploration / urban geocaching were asked:
- How to deal with aggressive homeless when exploring urbex?
- Urbex question: How to protect myself from asbestos?
Are such questions on-topic on The Great Outdoors?
2 Answers
There are many arguments for including Urbex in the scope of The Great Outdoors:
- Urbex is active form of spending free time outside your house
- it includes intensive physical activity
- many urbex constructions, like abandoned railways, are in the nature
- getting to abandoned objects often requires crossing hard bush terrain
- the equipment and abilities needed are very similar to those used by climbing, speleology, backpacking, survival
- the large cross-over with geocaching, parkour and survival
- similar target audience: people involved in urbex are highly likely to invoke in many other outdoor disciplines
While I would class Urban Exploration as on topic, and have upvoted your answer here, neither of those questions is on topic, as Benedikt commented.
Mentioning an on-topic subject in a question does not automatically make that question on-topic.
So this meta question's headline - "Is Urban Exploration on-topic" - could be answered with a definite Yes from me, but the two questions you linked to would be a definite No
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1While I tend to agree with your argument, I believe that these two questions suffers from the fact that these new tags are unpopular and without (yet?) many followers. If this was a main topic, would people be more receptive / lenient? I believe so, as those questions may not appear relevant from the outside, but may be quite on-topic and fruitful for the interested parties.– pplCommented Apr 20, 2014 at 5:37
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1I don't think that is the problem, ppl. I am definitely an interested party in urban exploration, but those questions are not about urban exploration at all.– Rory Alsop ModCommented Apr 20, 2014 at 7:49
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The second question clearly deals with the safety of urbex which I disagree with your statement that it is "not about urban exploration at all".– pplCommented Apr 20, 2014 at 15:51
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2Okay, I'd have to completely disagree with you on this. Would having 'how would i deal with asbestos as an artist working in old buildings?' make it an art question? No.– Rory Alsop ModCommented Apr 20, 2014 at 16:51
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Let me make a point by referencing an undisputable source (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_exploration); "Asbestos is a long term health risk for urban explorers, along with breathing in contaminants from dried bird feces, which can cause a condition known as pigeon lung, a form of hypersensitivity pneumonitis.". I believe it is more relevant than one might think. The boat question does not quite fit the mold in this case, imho.– pplCommented Apr 20, 2014 at 16:54
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1This discussion reminds me a little of stackoverflows boat-programming question... However, I think, the questions are perfectly on topic. Otherwhise any question about hypothermia should be asked in a medical forum, this question should be asked in a home improvement forum and so on...You run into these problems doing this activities, so they should be allowed to ask. They do no harm. Commented Apr 26, 2014 at 11:06
urbexin outdoors.stackexchange and was quite popular, then it was migrated to law.stackexchange and pretty much died... So, I guess it's still a grey area.