In the Episode 53 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.
