Is that so? Are the "benefits of initiating followers into the Blades of Skyrim?" more helpful or factually verifiable than a list of lesser known data structures?
Which variables get set when you do X is fairly factually verifiable. How do you factually verify a data structure is cool? More helpful? What is the task at hand? If I am playing Skyrim and trying to decide weather or not to initiate followers into the Blades of Skyrim, then the link you posted is most helpful. On the other hand I am not sure what task I would be undertaking where a bunch of data structures whose only commonality is obscurity would be truly helpful.
That has 2 answers. The datastructures question got closed after 89 (some of them duplicates). Plus they're on two different sites. I don't get the point of your reference.
It will most likely never happen. Mods and the community have a hard time as it is maintaining a base standard of what defines a SE Q&A site. The point of StackExchange was to create sites that did not duplicate already existing discussion forums.
As communities grow they learn and change the scope and that's what has happened here.
The current list questions that are open are under close scrutiny by a few community members. For example http://stackoverflow.com/questions/194812/list-of-freely-ava... is cleaned regularly for duplicates, arranged by language and alphabetically sorted.
A site like the one you would wish for would be highly popular but no user would ever want to clean it up, instead they will add another duplicate answer that may have been mentioned 1-2 years earlier.
You can suggest one on Area 51 (http://area51.stackexchange.com/) but I doubt it will get much traction. The Stack Exchange engine is much better for objective questions that have a correct answer than subjective questions that have a lot of different answers. Hacker News and reddit are much better for discussion topics.
I would argue that Hacker News and Reddit 'engines' are only good for transient content: interesting today, forgotten tomorrow.
The 'culture' on the other hands, on Hacker News and Reddit are more suited.
Taking culture into account, I think good homes for information are.
Transient, subjective: forum
Transient, objective: heavily moderated forum. Not perfect fit though.
Permanent, subjective: ??? There are some sites for this, but, I think they work pretty suboptimally. How do you keep the idiots out?
Permanent, objective: A 'pedia.
Good point about the transient nature of HN and reddit. They're really not suited to be a permanent home for the kinds of lists that people want to create on Stack Overflow. All three sites have the kind of community focus that can be used to create the lists, but they really need to be moved to Wikipedia for proper care and feeding once created.
The SO software is actually quite good for accumulating lists. It's the SO community that does not allow these questions. From what I can tell the SO moderators are evangelically convinced that any question involving an opinion (other than Jeff or Joel's) is the slippery slope to death by tragedy of the commons.
It's like someone read Clay Shirky as Atkin's diet.
The SO software is terrible at accumulating lists. Count the duplicate entries in the datastructure question. Also, which one of those answers is the correct one? That's what the SO software is designed to help us find, and it fails here, as it does with any question involving an opinion (Jeff's, Joel's, or anyone else's).
"Which of those answers is the correct one?" is not a problem if you are soliciting a list ... that's sometimes the point of the question.
"The single right answer is what SO was designed to help us find" is precisely the community norm that I find less desirable. It wasn't there at the start, it is there now. That community norm was a product decision by Jeff (and possibly Joel). It has since been taken to extremes due to the self re-enforcing feedback loop of the community. It's treated as a sort of born-again revealed wisdom by the group.
One could claim this limitation is the required tradeoff to attract the group that manages the site. That might be true ... but I don't blame the software.
Did the software close Alan Kay's question as not constructive or was it a pair of moderators?
What does non-constructive say:
"This question is not a good fit to our Q&A format. We expect answers to generally involve facts, references, or specific expertise; this question will likely solicit opinion, debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion. "
Except answers to Kay's question do involve facts, reference, and specific expertise, as well as opinion, and debate. Is the question really non-constructive ... or is was it actually closed as a side effect of the community norm?
The community norm is an over the top version of Godwin's law that opinion is a slippery slope to group death. It makes for a more focused product. The creators read this: http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html
Then cut the baby in half and kept the profitable half.
I'm claiming part of what they threw away makes SO less pleasant for me to use as a contributor. I actually don't like that I contributed to something that treats debate and opinion as anathema.
http://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/41411/whats-the-be...