How strict should we be on the Q&A format?

Question

I think a lot of people have questions that are not directly related to a technical question per se, but rather a "how do I approach this issue" question. Almost a best practice type of question.

How receptive should we be to questions that, while valid, may not be inline with the Stack Exchange Q&A standards? Are we allowed to safely use the term "best practice" in a Tridion discussion?

Answer 1

As Rob points out this is one of the the reasons for this Stack Exchange to exist.

There are a number of Stack Exchange sites (moms4mom, cooking, programming) which embrace questions which are going to result in subjective type answers. As long as the OP's original question isn't 'too subjective' and the people answering the questions follow the 'Back It Up! Principle' talked about in Good Subjective, Bad Subjective I think best-practice type questions and answers should be embraced and welcomed.

From my perspective, I would like this site to be both for Tridion knowledge Q&A as well as answering specific quesitons with objective answers like Serverfault/StackOverflow/Webmasters.

Answer 2

It's a grey area but it's also one of the reasons for the Stack Exchange site existing. There will definitely be questions like is X approach better than Y approach or what is the recommended way to do Z.

A lot of topics - e.g. Navigation, have several ways to approach them and each has their pros and cons but as a newbie, these pros and cons aren't necessarily obvious and it would be good to have them explained somewhere.

I guess it comes down to what we want the goal of the site to be, are we for disucssion of Tridion knowledge a la Programmers or are we for answering specific questions like Serverfault/StackOverflow.

Could we make use of the Community Wiki functionality here?

I'd say we keep an eye on it and watch out for argumentative questions e.g. "Why is X better than Y?" but allow for "What is the recommended way to do X?" as long as the answers give all arguments?

This is a hard question.

Answer 3

If we stick to the statement: "You should only ask practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face.", I think everything will fit.

Stack Overflow expects answers to be supported by facts, references, or specific expertise. Answering a best practice type of question, should then be perfectly fine since it can be supported by either references or specific expertise.

Answer 4

I think we can relax the requirement for "practical, answerable questions" if we have recognizable answers, keep high standards for questions, and focus on actual problems.

• The question should result in a set of recognizable answers, patterns, or approaches seen in SDL training, documentation, or examples online.
• We should keep high standards for well-researched questions. The asker should do some research, explain their reasoning, and provide sufficient background.
• We should keep the "on actual problems that you face" part.

The resulting Q&As should reflect specific solutions as well as good practices and approaches, even if "best practice" is up for debate.