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Our Q&A site attracts a lot of questions asking for a reference or a tool, which, as we all know, are off-topic. (Okay, the title of my question is provocative!)

I think I have seen other sites on SX which answer theses questions in the form of community wiki polls.

Would it not be useful for us to partially support some well-chosen off-topic question by adressing them in a specific format, thus advertising the special nature (i.e. off-topic) of the question?

This could reduce the housekeeping and provide useful information to visitors.

And while there is no best book to learn C++, it is not uncommon some books aer universally recognised as bad, and that some groups of persons agree that a particuliar hand of book are canonical references like in if you want to do a PhD in CS in domain X, Y then you cannot avoid reading A or B.

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Community Wiki questions don't exist to avoid the standards for good questions, meaning that making a poll a community wiki question doesn't mean that it won't or shouldn't be closed.

It's been something that I've personally been meaning to do more of, but tag wikis are designed to capture this kind of information. If you want one of the best examples of a tag wiki that I've ever seen, check out the scala tag on Stack Overflow.

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  • Thank you for pointing out this good example of tag wiki!
    – user40989
    Commented Dec 23, 2013 at 13:15
  • That tag is amazing.....
    – Ampt
    Commented Dec 23, 2013 at 15:09
  • It's certainly great information, but a shame it's hidden behind a tag wiki. Perhaps I'm just ignorant, but I've been using these SE sites since the beginning, and I didn't know the tag wikis were intended to hold such information. I wonder how many new/casual users will stumble across them.
    – Eric King
    Commented Dec 23, 2013 at 15:52
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    @EricKing Its a chicken and egg problem. Though one of the first steps is to make the majorly used tag-wikis great so that people will refer to them and those unfamiliar with them will find them referenced in comments and start looking there early on. I'll certainly admit that it is not the most visible and could do with more, but until the quality is there to say "this should be more visible" is a difficult sell.
    – user40980
    Commented Dec 23, 2013 at 15:59
  • @MichaelT agreed
    – Eric King
    Commented Dec 23, 2013 at 16:02
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    The PHP and C++ tags are also very good.
    – Robert Harvey
    Commented Dec 24, 2013 at 17:36

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