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There are now a lot of SE 2.0 sites, and many users on those sites might not even know about Stack Overflow or Meta.SO. If they have a question about the site, they ask it on their per-site meta, which is encouraged even if the question is not specific to that site.

This leads to a lot of duplication, and also prevents those users from finding answers to their questions on their own. If they search on their per-site meta, they won't find an answer on Meta.SO.

Requiring users to go to Meta.SO for network-wide issues is problematic on many levels, and something SE has strongly opposed, so this can't be the solution.

What I would propose is to make -questions on Meta.SO available on all per-site metas in some form. They should appear in search results on that per-site meta, but maybe not directly in the regular questions list but in some separate tab.

The exact list of questions that would be available across the network would need some refinement, SO-specific questions should be excluded. That could be achieved by splitting the FAQ-tag, or by only showing questions with FAQ but not the stackoverflow tag.

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  • And a simple one line at the end of the search result to point to those faqs would help "advertise" the faq
    – Meer Borg
    Mar 13, 2013 at 12:55
  • Can we just have the overall FAQ question only as the FAQ questions are not organised and confuse me, I dread to think what new users think of if
    – mmmmmm
    Mar 13, 2013 at 13:28
  • 1
    another variation of this theme: Is there an easy way to get here from the meta sites?
    – Wolf
    Dec 16, 2014 at 13:52

1 Answer 1

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After the MSO-MSE split, there was plenty of discussion on MSO on how to close cross site duplicates, due to the wealth of good answers that MSO left behind on MSE, and how to fill the void there.

I think the MSO users were struggling to understand what users on other SE sites had known for some time - they need to create their own content for their own meta.

One of the things that I think might be useful is for SE to seed the child meta of any new site with the library from MSE (or at least a large subset skipping things that might not be appliciable such as What can I do when getting "We are no longer accepting questions/answers from this account"?). I think this posts should actually be copied into the meta site and be available both as a duplicate target, and to be edited so the site can tweak the [faq] for their own use.

This would provide he child meta with a good foundation of questions and still allow them the flexibility to curate their own [faq] by editing what is there and adding to it.

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