Kill the book lists and put them home in their respective tag wikis [closed]

Question

Sock your eyeballs on the horde of questions tagged books on Stack Overflow. Clearly this is a honeypot for programmers to rifle through their desks, pantries and basements and post whatever tomes tickle their fancy and use for pillows at night. Nobody goes around actively curating them into sanity after they jump into multiple pages.

Let's all move these into their respective tag wikis if they're paired up with a programming language or pattern and kill the ones that are left lying around.

Take for the slaughter, What is the best Python book for experienced programmers?.

Looking at the python tag wiki, we see a very standard, "this is how you tag, this is what's current and here are some starter links".

But we're missing out on all the refined sugar laden in that book list that would greatly make that tag wiki a whole lot more informative for being a right and proper place to kick start reading about said language.

And others still, ill-fit for the question model and crying out to be curated into a sane section on their tag wikis. Book lists such as:

• x86
• Ruby
• Test driven development
• Compiler

These book lists don't belong as questions. They belong as tag wiki sections.

Shall we go forth and make sense?

Answer 1

It looks like this has started to be done.

IMO, this needs to stop and be reversed immediately.

• I (many of us) don't want to see a list of "good" books or "hidden" features from some random answerer or tag editor. This is purely subjective and the exact reason the questions were a bad fit for the site!

• Subjective lists are even worse in a tag wiki, where there's no way to vote on them. The editor either prescribes it or not, and editors may war over entries.

You said:

Nobody goes around actively curating them into sanity after they jump into multiple pages.

How does this address that? We have a real problem with tag wikis not being upkept or even created. Stuffing all this into them doesn't make sense. (Tag wikis may need a size and functionality increase, but certainly as-is I don't see how this can work.)

Answer 2

As mentioned in the comments by @animuson, a vast majority of users do not have rights to edit tag wikis which means very few are going to end up doing the work. So I propose an alternate workflow for this:

1. the various answers for these questions are all consolidated into the existing highest voted answer, which will invariably already be CW owned (or will be in short order with enough edits)
2. once each answer has been consolidated, it can then be flagged for deletion using the Other reason, it will be a simple task for a mod to check the edit history of the main answer to confirm it has been done.
3. pretty soon there will be a single answer for the question, at this point that single answer can be added to the tag wiki by someone with sufficient rep, and the question itself can be deleted.

TL;DR: It may look like a convoluted process, but consider the following:

• If the answers are edited directly into a wiki how are we going to tell whether everything has been captured before the question is deleted? If we are going to bother spending the time doing this, then let's do a thorough job, not a "it's close enough" attempt.
• someone has to actually approve the tag wiki edit for a lot of the SO users, this could end up being a reasonable amount of work. Or do you intend to exclude sub 20K users from assisting with this?