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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.

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    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
    Commented Aug 12, 2015 at 11:25
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    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
    Commented Aug 12, 2015 at 20:00

1 Answer 1

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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.

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