Could/Should we create a collection of exemplary questions to encourage high-quality asking?

Question

I haven't been on this site long enough to know from personal experience, but perusing old (and recent) Meta posts like these below makes me wonder if members have not always been under the impression that Low Quality Questions are hitting crisis levels.

1. Extraordinary spike in low-quality questions by 1 rep users (January 2016)

2. A simple proposal towards improving question quality (July 2014)

3. Excessive number of fundamental questions (May 2013)

Occasionally, users have suggested encouraging senior members to ask good questions as a model for other users:

1. Could more questions from senior/experienced users benefit ELU? (October 2015)

2. Do we need to write the better questions ourselves? (October 2012)

Very recently there has been significant discussion on ways to reduce Low-Quality Questions, including using Artificial Intelligence, using Selective Blacklisting, banning or limiting single-word-request questions, and other thoughts.

Observing that low-quality questions seem to have been a complaint on this site for a long time and show few signs of diminishing, I'm inclined to wonder how best to incentivize asking good questions. One thought would be to attempt to collect some of the best questions for some of the common tags as a model for how to ask insightful and interesting questions.

Unfortunately, I don't think measuring this by votes really works, since Hot Network Questions can often yield huge numbers of upvotes on questions that are really not exemplary, and likewise, many excellent questions receive very little attention if they fly under the radar. I imagine there would need to be community discussion on what would qualify as exemplary, perhaps with knowledgeable input from users with gold badges on the tags in question.

1. Has anyone attempted to create such a collection in the past, a sort of model for asking good questions?

2. If not, does anyone think this would be a worthwhile endeavor?

3. Is it actually feasible, or am I being naïve?

Answer 1

The idea appeals to me, but in practical terms, I don't think it is really feasible, for various reasons.

• Mechanical: as far as I know, there is no existing Stack Exchange system that would be ideal for this purpose. The closest I can think of is a list on this Meta with answers that we vote for, as was done with Please vote for the most exemplary single-word-request questions (to be put in Help Center). But this seems like it would quickly get unwieldy as more examples are added (and maintenance would also probably be a problem). Basically, the SE QA format is not designed for long lists, as is well-known.

• Social: We all have our own opinions about what makes a question "exemplary". Even if we all can agree on the general concept that some posts have high scores due to bikeshedding, and other posts have low scores despite being insightful and interesting, we probably won't all agree about which specific questions are examples of this. Reaching a consensus is difficult and takes hard work. There are tons of questions on this Meta site that don't stimulate enough community participation to really achieve this goal.

• Political: SE has its own "politics" and one thing that fairly often comes up as a concern is the idea of exclusivity by a cabal of high-rep users who want to impose their opinions on the rest of the users of the site. Depending on how this project is carried out, it seems likely that it would be perceived as an example of this. The voting system, despite its faults, seems less susceptible to this kind of criticism due to its democratic nature.

Answer 2

You want a nice collection of exemplary questions? That's easy; simply use this link.

Footnote: I once praised Yoichi Oishi's questions in an ELL meta answer.

As others have said, I don't think having this link anywhere will diminish the high number of shoddy questions that continue to plague this site. Still, it might be nice to have a handy link when you are trying to gently nudge a newer user in the right direction.

EDIT

Seeing that this question is getting more downvotes than upvotes, I'd like to clarify: The original link is to a list of questions written by one of ELU's most prestigious users, sorted by votes. I'm not saying these questions are exemplary because of what they ask about, I'm saying they are exemplary because of how they are presented and structured.

I have always thought that Yoichi's questions provide a good example of:

• providing background information and context,
• referencing what kind of prior research was done, and
• clearly presenting the question

(or, as the OP of this meta question puts it, "a sort of model for asking good questions").

When the OP of this meta question talks about Low-Quality Questions, I'm assuming that means questions that provide scant background information and context, don't mention any prior research, and aren't always clear about what is being asked. For example, in the last hour or so, I've seen new users ask:

Does first come, first served need to be hyphenated?

Is first come, first served hyphenated (first-come, first-served? Thank you.

and:

I need help with a short phrase

I need help with this phrase, pls.

what does "offering empowering" mean?

Thanks

and:

Word request. Any other words for “delicate beauty” or any similar?

I'm trying to make it sound that her beauty is the opposite of dangerous, it's delicate but it doesn't perfectly describe what I want to say.

As I type this, all three of these questions are (probably rightfully) getting downvotes, close votes, and/or comments requesting further information, details, context, or comments asking about what prior research was done. If any of these commenters wanted to link to an exemplary question showing how to do this, they could easily pick one of Yoichi's top-voted questions, such as:

Who is "That Guy"?

I found the term “that guy”, used as “He embarked on a career as a 'that guy',” in the following sentence of the article of the New Yorker (Feb. 7, 2011) titled “the Most Interesting Man in the World”:

In a recalls of a contentious exchange with Hoffman: “I jumped up and said, ‘Dustin, the reason you don’t like me is because I’m gonna make it and you’re not.’ ” Jonathan Goldsmith eventually made it - out to Los Angeles, anyway—and embarked on a career as a “that guy,” very often the that guy who gets killed, on television shows such as “Bonanza,” “Mannix,” “Gunsmoke,” “Hawaii Five-O,” ... to name a few.

As I don’t understand what that guy used in quotes means, I checked online dictionaries. Neither Cambridge online, nor Free Merriam-Webster has an entry for “that guy.”

Only Onlineslangdictionary.com carries the definition as “any person who does something considered inappropriate,” with an example, “I was going to crack a joke then, but I didn't want to be that guy.” But I don’t think this definition applies to “that guy” appearing in the above sentence.

What does “that guy” as a career Goldsmith built up mean? Does it mean a villain (in the film)? Is "that guy" a well-received of its own word?

or:

Are there similar expressions to the Japanese saying “I want to die on a tatami mat”?

Today most people die in a hospital bed, though many would prefer to die in their own home being watched over by their loving family.

We have an old saying, “to die on a tatami mat”, meaning to die peacefully in one’s own home — as opposed to dying miserably and bedridden in a hospital while being distressed by the presence of tubes supplying oxygen and nutrients as if one was trussed up with some sort of monstrous spaghetti.

For reference, tatami is a floor mat made of woven rush which you may find in most Japanese houses. (The size of a room is quantified in terms of the number of tatamis, e.g. a 6-tatami room or a 12-tatami room.)

“To die on a tatami mat” originally meant “to end a peaceful life” without being subjected to such perils as war, fighting, fires, earthquakes, tsunamis and typhoons as are rife in this country. By extension, we call a reckless person “a fellow who is unable to die on a tatami mat.”

I associate “aging in place”, a term which I understand is current these days, with “dying on a tatami mat.” But the connotation is not the same.

Are there any English-language expressions that are similar to the Japanese saying “I want to die on a tatami mat”?

I believe that if more users emulated Yoichi in provide such details, the site overall would be a much happier and more interesting place.

Answer 3

tl;dr - Add links to the tags and point people to the relevant tag info pages.

---

There is some (but very little) precedence for curated question lists. This blog picked out 3 noteworthy questions from 2014:

• Good things from 2014 - by Matt Ellen

We could use a Meta post such as your question to house links to canonical questions (I even suggested placing them in the blog back when blogs were supported on SE). Either create a new answer per curator or (better) a new answer per type of question. This may have been suggested and rejected before, but a quick search didn't produce the original posts. The inverse (list of bad questions) has had some support. There was even a chat room for that purpose. The problem is finding those questions, rather than having to search for each individual question or type of question.

A more useful approach would be to link tags to representative questions, as is done on the SWR info page. That is, to edit tag info pages to insert links to good questions relevant to that tag.

I'd also suggest adding a note to the tag's tool-tips paragraph to say that the 'info' link leads to a list of canonical questions.

Answer 4

This is an excellent idea, and it probably will help significantly, but only if it is part of a comprehensive, cohesive, and coordinated effort to improve usability and to ensure (as much as possible) that newcomers understand the rules.

We are also discussing this issue on Health.SE. My and others' suggestions there would help here too:

We need Crystal Clear Rules for Asking Questions