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Possible Duplicate:
Another take on canonical answers: Add a “canonical” vote

I just read Joel's post about Encyclopedia Stack Exchange and I've always been a strong advocate of all four circles of the diagram, but oft-times wondered where these blog type Questions and Answers are on our site.

But it's good that Joel is re-enforcing and reminding us that useful self-answered questions, to share what you already know, firmly belong on our sites.

Pekka added a comment in response to this statement in the article:

For a long time we’ve been pleading for people to write more canonical answers so the same questions don’t keep coming up again and again, and we even have the Self-Learner badge which you can only earn by answering your own question

Pekka's response:

This doesn’t take the system closer to more canonical questions and answers, though. The UI improvements to the “vote to close” dialog were a big step forward, but there still isn’t enough incentive to seriously identify dupes, and look for good canonical questions.

I very much agree with this sentiment, good canonical questions are hard to identify. Now and again during my mod duties, and when closing questions as duplicates, I find myself popping into one of the language specific chat rooms to ask the regulars who hang out there if they know of a question and answer that they would treat as a canonical post for the flagged post in hand.

The hardcore users of our community appear to know many of these canonical posts but this useful data is silo'd away in the brains of these people and no-where else. There's no way to formally identify them as such other than to ask. There are some "reference" questions dotted about but such as the big PHP operator question but they're informally accepted as canonical (by way of "Reference" in the title) and there's no other way to quickly find it e.g. by tag filtering which would be the obvious way [php] [canonical-question].

I'm wondering if it would be useful to properly and officially identify canonical questions and have them tagged with a special "canonical" tag (with the following caveat).

No single user would be permitted to arbitrarily add this tag to a post, it would be a system tag and for a post to get this tag or canonical status it would (say) need to be voted on - much like we do with tag synonyms.

Returning to Pekka's mention about the close dialogue. To make identification of a canonical question easier, the close dialogue would try to identify matching questions, as it does already, but those that are tagged canonical are promoted to the top of the list and highlighted in some way (bold text whatever) to indicate that this is possibly the best close candidate.

Thoughts?

Updated:

BoltClock just pointed out Pekka's question:

https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/116087/another-take-on-canonical-answers-add-a-canonical-vote

That pretty much covers all the same ground here so feel free to close this as a dupe.

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  • It is a dupe but honestly, I'm really supportive of this idea and am (hypocritically, I admit) happy to have numerous instances of it floating around Meta until it actually gets some kind of implementation (hopefully involving Pekka's cannon-shaped button) or at least produces a "canonical" question of its own.
    – jscs
    May 24, 2012 at 18:24

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