Dealing with recommendations (scifi.stackexchange.com)

Fri, 28 Jan 2011 17:52:12 +1200

One of the problems that scifi.stackexchange.com faces that isn’t unique to that site is “recommendation” questions. These are a specific type of list question (which are generally ill-suited to the sites), where each answer offers one possible recommendation, and the votes cast are not just “that’s a good answer” or “that’s a bad answer”, but votes for (and less often, against) a suggestion. StackOverflow has a long history of problems with these sorts of questions (e.g. “favourite programming cartoon” and “great programming quotes”). With few exceptions, these questions are closed, often not before they gather huge numbers of votes, answers, and answer votes. I don’t really see a huge problem with these questions myself - if they are “community wiki” then they aren’t just a way to gather huge amounts of reputation, the voting has merit (if something is popular, it is likely for a reason), and the format does fit (unlike discussions, for example). I can understand that a specific site might choose to disallow them (e.g. StackOverflow), but others (e.g. programmers.stackexchange.com) could allow them. I don’t think that having the majority (or even just a non-small percentage) of a site’s questions be ones of this type would do much for the quality, but in moderation they seem ok. I doubt this would ever be allowed by the powers that be at StackExchange, but I think the following would be a great system for scifi.stackexchange.com:

Recommendations on Tony Andrew Meyer

Dealing with recommendations (scifi.stackexchange.com)