8

While reviewing, I was asked to give my opinion about Why is geo-redundant DNS necessary for small sites?. This seemed odd to me, so I assumed it was a test to see if I was paying attention. I clicked that the question seemed fine to me and I passed the test.

Normally, when seeing a question worded like that one, I'd check the matching canonical question, see if it answers the problem and point there if it does. But in this case, I clicked Looks OK because there was a nice yellow block above the question stating that it was a canonical question.

Is it intended that canonical questions can appear in the review queue as a test? For me the correct response was not obvious, my hunch was that I had to accept it because canonical questions exist and it probably had a lot of upvotes, but I did not judge the question by its content.

2
  • 1
    The test isn't there to see if you are adequately judging the questions. It's to see if you are paying attention. Even though this is probably a weird side-effect of the way ServerFault has implemented canonical questions, I'd say it's one of my favorite review audits. Less random chance of incorrect action and easy to judge for a person paying attention.
    – Reaces
    Aug 12, 2015 at 11:25
  • 4
    The funny thing is, in the absence of a great amount of context or a banner saying they're exceptions, most canonical questions are off-topic.
    – Hyppy
    Aug 12, 2015 at 20:00

1 Answer 1

11

To my understanding canonical questions are a ServerFault convention, of which the review-question selection algorithm is completely unaware.

Which is to say, it had to happen some time. Treat it like any other question.

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .