Proposal for Leveraging the Main Site for "Blog Posts" and Other Extended Content

Question

Instead of creating an external blog to replace the Stack Exchange blog, why don't we just leverage the normal Q&A to do this?

Here's how it would work:

1. Write your blog post in any ordinary editor.
2. Split your post into a question & answer pair or title/abstract/body combination (Abstract goes into question, body goes into answer).
3. Answer your own question.
4. Flag the post and ask a moderator to add a "Wiki Lock" to it (not Community Wiki). The Wiki Lock allows anyone to collaboratively edit the post (if they have editing privileges), but prevents other answers from being posted.

I know what you're thinking: "This won't work, because reasons." Here's why I think it will work, and why it will work better than a blog:

1. The community owns it (with first-authorship preserved).
2. There is already some precedent: it's called Canonical Q&A. We've already done that here at least once, with great effect.
3. Canonical posts benefit from all of the facilities that are already provided by the Q&A machinery, such as full visibility, voting, collaborative editing and the ability to comment.

But what about closing?

In order to prevent closure, your blog post would have to be high enough quality to overcome objections like "Too Broad." Not everyone is going to rise to this level of quality, but that's why it's a Canonical post and not ordinary Q&A.

The usual "on-topic" rules would have to be relaxed a little bit. Obviously they would still have to pertain in some way to Software Engineering. But let's be honest: most questions are not closed because they are off-topic; they're closed because they're just not all that interesting, and "off-topic" provides a good excuse.

On Stack Overflow, canonical questions have allowed people on many occasions to post useful, blog-like material that extends well beyond the usual parade of code troubleshooting questions. Similarly, we could use this mechanism to provide those folks who have an itch with an outlet to create better content than the usual parade of pattern matching, name that thing and "am I doing it right" questions and answers that frequent our front page.

Further Reading
List of Canonical Questions on Stack Overflow
Encyclopedia Stack Exchange

Answer 1

Absolutely not. This is neither good for the site, nor are Stack Exchange questions a very suitable medium for a blog. I would prefer us to use an external blog and to find other mechanisms to integrate it with this site.

The primary reason why I think blog-answers are not a good fit here is that on-topic questions could just be posted as ordinary questions, no blog mechanism needed. But a blog would be great for stuff that doesn't fit the question-and-answer format: opinions, essays, and the like.

Your suggested mechanism for Q&A-blog posts muddies our site scope. We have historically had some difficulty communicating the scope of the site. Adding an escape hatch to our site scope like “everything is OK if you call it a blog post and get at least 5 upvotes” will be confusing.

• It sets a precedent for content on the site that we don't want to see as ordinary questions. On a fairly regular basis new users ask “Why was my question closed? There are similar questions like this!” – which usually refers to a locked or closed question from the Not-Programming-Related era. Fresh blog posts would worsen this, especially as they would appear on the front page.

• Please tell me wiki-locked questions don't appear in the hot network questions list. If they did, this would damage perception of our site scope considerably.

Your suggested mechanism also adds work for moderators. In particular, applying the lock requires prompt action by mods to prevent additional answers from being posted. That's probably manageable when coordinated in a chatroom.

However, this also puts the final decision what should and shouldn't be blog-protected into the hands of our moderation team. How should they decide? Should they only accept submissions by a select few? That won't go over well. Or should they apply their own judgement? When submissions are declined, how long do you guess we'll have to wait for the first “Mod Abuse!” meta questions?

As mentioned above, I think SE isn't a good blogging engine, any community considerations aside.

• No full-text RSS feeds of blog posts/answers. The next best thing is a feed for questions of a tag.

• Fewer and less visible sharing widgets (although that's good from a privacy perspective).

• SE isn't very accessible. While I don't use assistive technologies, I do sometimes use text-extraction or read-later services like Pocket or Instapaper. On SE, they currently interpret only the question as main content; any comments and answers hidden as clutter (and the SE pages have a lot of navigation clutter). For a Q&A that's OK since participation like voting and answering are integral parts, for a lengthy blog post it is not.

• Fairly restricted markdown only. No tables, definition lists, or figures.

• Embedding content (tweets, slides, videos, pdfs, gists) isn't possible (although that's good from a privacy perspective).

• Extremely restricted commenting. 500 chars isn't sufficient to tell someone on the internet they are wrong. Well, it's enough to tell them that they are wrong but not for an in-depth explanation.

Even though you may not consider these points an issue, I do not see how any of this makes SE a good choice for blog posts when compared with something like GitHub pages or a simple Wordpress site.