List Questions - What to do with new ones

Question

A "list question" recently came up. This is not asking for a list of options which satisfy as set of requirements, that's a "shopping question". They were originally allowed on SF, and still are on SO.

We have been locking old questions with the "Historical Significance" message, so we can still use them as a reference, but new questions can't use them as justification. However, this new question could be of value just the same.

The problem lies not in having multiple options for Answering such question, but in the question of how much detail belongs in the Answer. We could edit in the most minute details and easily hit the 32k character limit given enough time and effort. This would quickly degrade into a useless checklist; akin to using a telephone book for an address book by crossing off the people you don't know.

So, what does the community think? Should we allow these questions and expect an intelligent level of contribution from our professional patrons? Or should we just kill it now and leave future professionals to the same devices we had (trial, error, and learning from our mistakes)?

Answer 1

From le FAQ:

Your questions should be reasonably scoped. If you can imagine an entire book that answers your question, you’re asking too much.

List questions seem to be, if not dead ringers for that FAQ sub-section, very close to it.

Also from the FAQ:

You should only ask practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face. Chatty, open-ended questions diminish the usefulness of our site and push other questions off the front page.

Lists seem a bit too chatty. Rather open ended. Potentially unanswerable.

It's also too much of a moving target IMO. The proper answers to many list questions will change over time. "What do you do when building a server" will change with time. Perhaps that specific question will stay relevant for a decade, which might be acceptable, but it will change. Eventually.

I say: Burninate. Kitty kitty does not like.

Answer 2

It's funny that this came up today: all day I've been pondering how to ask a subjective question and worrying that it might be considered a list question.

For this question, there are a couple things that make me inclined to close it:

• As it is, it's actually so broad that it's Not a Real Question. He's asking for a checklist for "quoting, building, installing and servicing" servers. The two answers there now (his and voretaq7's) are lists of some of the things you would think about at different stages in the life of a server, but they're nowhere near covering all of the stages.

• Even if you limited the question to just one stage (e.g. "a checklist for commissioning a server"), I think you'd still want to close it as "Not Constructive."

The thing is, there are endless details that are critical in some environments but not others, and you could always argue for including them on the list. If you did a poll of everyone's top 10 "Things to check on a new server," you'd come up with something 20 items that are the most common, and a huge long tail of other items that are critical to someone.

(Now I've got to figure out why I think a question asking for strategies or approaches to a problem is ok ("Good Subjective.") even though you could make similar arguments about it.)

Answer 3

TL;DR: "It really depends on the question."

GENERAL CASE: List Questions Suck

List questions off the form "What X do you use for Y?", "What products exist that do Z?", and the like are crap questions. They can almost always be answered better by Google, and Google will do a better job keeping its answer up to date than we could ever hope to.

Possible Exceptions

1. Checklist Questions
   A good checklist / Best Practices question that can be used by others to develop their own checklists can be a Good Thing. If nothing else it provides a canonical destination for newbies so we don't have to keep closing the same thing over and over as "not constructive" and leaving pointer comments.
   (The key here is we're NOT aiming to provide a comprehensive, permanent answer: Just a list of considerations that won't change as a base for someone to make up their own list that will evolve over time.)

Answer 4

After reading both the question being discussed and what is being discussed here I still can't understand why anyone sees it as a legitimate and answerable question. In my opinion it is definitely not a worthwhile question and has absolutely nothing to distinguish it from the numerous others we close. I'm voting to close it and can only wonder why this is even being discussed.