Timeline for Should we allow list questions taged as **big-list** for now?
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| Jul 26, 2012 at 10:12 | comment | added | Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' Mod | @Raphael My primary experience of list questions is with Science Fiction & Fantasy (where we had a lot of them initially), but Stack Overflow has had the same problems, only on SO list questions (including polls, which are a subtype) are a small proportion of the site that one can ignore (but isn't a good representation of the site to good users). CS is closer in audience to SO than to CSTheory. CS is even closer to Math, and I know Math does a lot of things differently; I don't think they've had any success with big lists, but they don't tend to care, and they have a lot of other stuff to compensate. | |
| Jul 26, 2012 at 10:08 | comment | added | Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' Mod | @A.Schulz The subjective guidelines were intended to be about subjective questions. I don't know of a similar post about list questions; I've tried writing a couple (drawing on experience from many sites, including Science Fiction & Fantasy and Stack Overflow) but I've never been able to fully articulate what works (not much) and what doesn't and why it doesn't. I know it isn't immediately obvious that list questions don't work in the Q&A format; it took a couple of years for the SO community to realize that poll questions weren't doing anything useful. | |
| Jul 26, 2012 at 9:14 | comment | added | Raphael Mod | Gilles, please remember that not all of us (if anyone) has your experience with budding SE sites. What you take for granted, we can not know. Also, evidence suggests that what works depends heavily on the kind of clientele the respective site has so your experience may or may not carry over. | |
| Jul 26, 2012 at 7:55 | comment | added | A.Schulz | @Gilles: Thanks for the link, which I missed. Maybe there is too much confusion what a list question is. Isn't it a feature of SE that you will get a list of answers? And isn't it the case that a combination of answers (let say a problem was solved differently) might be more enlightening than just a single answer? (I understand that it is not helpful to ask for items.) So my impression is, that the core of the problem is more how to handle subjective questions. And this was indeed covered nicely in the blog post. | |
| Jul 26, 2012 at 7:28 | comment | added | Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' Mod | @A.Schulz The key point is that the question must call for answers that contain a sufficient collection of items, not for answers that contain a single item. For recommendation-type questions, there are guidelines (linked from the FAQ) such as “long, not short, answers” and “answers that explain “why” and “how”” and “more than just mindless social fun”. Other than that, the wisdom against list questions arose from experience, and isn't directly reflected in the generic FAQ. | |
| Jul 26, 2012 at 6:52 | comment | added | A.Schulz | Okay, I got your point. But isn't “What collection of books and articles would make a good background for a semester course about X?” a list question as well? How to handle questions like "I want to learn more about subject X, which resources are helpful?". I think many people have these kind of questions. Sure you can phrase it one way or the other. Also, If you say "The time to eliminate bad questions is now ..." then there should be a clear and visible policy about list questions soon be available, because it is handled on the different SE sites differently. | |
| Jul 26, 2012 at 5:56 | comment | added | Raphael Mod | See this latest question as an example for poor (if well-meaning) answers on a list question. | |
| Jul 25, 2012 at 21:56 | history | answered | Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'Mod | CC BY-SA 3.0 |