"Too localized" is a term I encountered on mathoverflow, where it is grounds for closing a question that is a routine exercise for undergraduates, as opposed to a research question. But here on stackexchange, routine exercises for undergraduates are probably more than 50% of all questions and are appropriate. So what does "too localized" mean here?
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9$\begingroup$ It means a question that one dislikes. $\endgroup$– André NicolasJul 29, 2011 at 23:58
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7$\begingroup$ @andre this is not what it means $\endgroup$– Jeff AtwoodJul 30, 2011 at 6:30
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According to the "close" box, "too localized" means:
This question is unlikely to ever help any future visitors; it is only relevant to a small geographic area, a specific moment in time, or an extraordinarily narrow situation that is not generally applicable to the worldwide audience of the internet.
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1$\begingroup$ That's very different from what it means on mathoverflow! $\endgroup$ Jul 30, 2011 at 2:12
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4$\begingroup$ If you use the same literal meaning of Too Localized on MathOverflow, some 80% of all the non-CW questions about something other than algebraic geometry or number theory would be closed as too localized. =) Which is why over there the closure reason (which list, btw, is fixed in software) is abused to mean something else by convention. $\endgroup$ Jul 30, 2011 at 4:53
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4$\begingroup$ If you feel a question should be closed, you have to choose from a very small list of options, whether it's here or on MathOverflow, and on either site it may be the case that no option really fits. So what do you do? I have no solution to offer; I'm just suggesting that if it's your question being closed or threatened with closure, you pay less attention to the button that gets ticked and more to the comments that, one hopes, the closure-voters leave. $\endgroup$ Jul 30, 2011 at 13:20