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I think the stack exchange is fantastic. But I have a limited amount of time for searching for answers to my questions, and 'the what should I ask' critera makes it even more awkward for me to ask questions. The 'similar questions' bar on the right is great, but what would be even better would be to build more of these Q&As into community wikis, and to develop the layout of the community wiki to make it as intuitive as possible. Naturally, questions breed more questions, and it isn't always intuitive to just ask one question at a time. Sometimes you have to ask a whole series of questions to get to the answer you want.

Feedback and opinions would be great!

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The Scala tag wiki on Stack Overflow is rather, well, interesting in this regard - have a look at it. Someone actually wove together almost an entire language tutorial from one question successively to another, then another. That's great for a whole language tag, but it doesn't really allow for the smaller segments of 'chains' that you're talking about.

I'm of the opinion that the tag wiki system doesn't nearly come close to doing everything that it could for us, and this is a really good example of something it could be doing provided that a way to make all of the information easy to discover is devised.

Our usual question format isn't ideal for what you describe, we'd need some sort of special status to give these sort of stubs, which could conceivably be nominated by someone creating them through the tag wiki system.

Note that I'm not saying that we're going to do this, or do it any time soon, it's just another classic example of how they could be doing more for us - and I wanted to get that down. The idea you have has value so long as it doesn't actively encourage folks to try and crowd source entire projects - but I think we can keep that from happening easy enough.

I'm not putting a status on this yet - as really sitting down with the tag wiki system is on my list to do before the end of this year, and this is one more piece of the puzzle that I'd like to find a fit for in a broader / better scheme of things when it comes to them.

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    Just a note - expanding tag wikis and even how they attach to questions isn't very hard, it's the whole making all of that information easy to discover (and crawl) without adding a ton of clutter that gets tricky. I'd more than welcome any feature-request here or on MSO that tries to solve that problem, even a little bit.
    – Tim Post
    Nov 11, 2013 at 17:02
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First and foremost, Stack Exchange is not a forum. There's a really good blog post on this that I can't find right now. The tl;dr version is that forums have a terrible signal to noise ratio.

Stack Exchange exists to build a library of high-quality questions and answers. Oddly enough, solving any one user's problem isn't as high a priority as one might expect. The priority is to collect general / reusable questions and answers that benefit hundreds or thousands of people who have the same issue.

Most (all?) SE sites have chat. I haven't used it much, but if you need to have a conversation, that's the place to do it.

Community Wiki isn't always the right answer.

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