In the [Episode 53][1] of the podcast a Joel specifically encouraged listeners to post good generic questions on stackoverflow.  I think we can pretty much assume he would approve of the same behavior on serverfault.

Episode 53 ~ 50:24 
> **Joel Spolsky**: I would
> like to see a bunch of people who are
> listening to this podcast to go in
> there and think about what are you
> easiest programming questions.  What
> is the first question you would have
> if you where a noob.  Learning how to
> program, what would be those confusing
> things.  Do you really have to make
> those brace match?  What the heck does
> private mean? What does public mean?
> What does friend mean? Post them as
> questions and lets see what good
> answers we get.  The truth is I am
> kind of selfish, I want a lot of
> traffic for stackoverflow because this
> is how I know stackoverflow is
> successful.  So I want to have these
> canonical little articles about every
> possible topic of programming.

I think we should be doing it, and I have asked a few questions like this.  I try to phrase the question in such a way to discourage a simple copy and paste from Wikipedia.  I personally think the questions should try to get people to offer the types of information that don't really fit into Wikipedia model.

  [1]: http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/audio/download/ITC.SO-Episode53-2009.05.12.mp3