Addition of a technical FAQ

Question

My apologies if this has been discussed, although searching through the history the only FAQ people refer to seems to be the About section.

What is the community leadership's thoughts on adding a technical FAQ somewhere that links to the most commonly asked questions, and making this link prominent (maybe putting it in the Community Bulletin)? I see a lot of duplicate questions asked on a pretty regular basis. One example of this is a question asked today about memory usage in Linux. My background is in Linux so I'm sure I notice this more than others. However, i'd be surprised if this wasn't a common occurrence for other areas.

These questions have been answered thoroughly, so I don't see a need to rewrite answers. However, I think a need exists for something like this, since the FAQ as-is informs on how to ask & answer questions. The 'frequent' tab deals with questions that don't belong on Serverfault.

Essentially, I think having a section dedicated to the most frequent questions that do belong on Serverfault would enhance the value of the site.

Answer 1

1. What are the canonical answers we've discovered over the years?

2. I don't think it's in the official help, but you'll run across a link back to it in every Canonical Question.

3. We've had other efforts to make it more visible, but they've all been pretty well shot down. Also, I believe the search function prioritizes questions with many views and which are linked to by other questions, so those canonical questions should show up near the top (I know Google does this, in case you have "issues" with the in-site search).

   Problem is, very few of the noobs search for anything in the first place, and even if they do run across the answer many of the canonicals deal with misunderstandings, so the answer is not "set XYZ_MAGIC and ZOMG it works!!" - they see more than 160 characters of text, go all "TL;DR", and start clicking the "Ask Question" button.