Meta often receives a lot of questions about "How should I behave when ....". Often those questions are just made by user asking how their own specific case should be handled, but many times those instructions could be useful to other users facing the same issue too.
Example: A user is having some problem that they think is caused by some other user/mod/whatever not following the rules - for example they believe that someone has used sockpuppets to game the system and strategically downvote them. Or they claim some of its content was plagiarised.
The user then posts a question on the meta site, asking what to do and adds a link to the actual post that was downvoted or whatever else. Other users read the question, review the issues and notice that the question creator was just ranting. There is no indication of system gaming, no rude post was made, the rule violation isn't there and so on. They then react by heavily downvoting the post and often comments to say that the user claims are wrong. Sometime the post gets closed as a result.
And everybody is happy and the kingdom is peaceful again.
... or so I used to think. Lately, I have been asking myself if we are really supposed to behave that way. Let me explain.
When someone post a question about how to behave when something happens and then provides a sample that may or may not be real/correct, should we answer to the single case or to the generic problem? And what about votes?
In a way, votes control visibility. So, if someone points out a real issue that should be considered but fails to provide a correct sample... should we upvote the question based to the fact that the generic problem exist and a guidance is useful, or should we downvote it based on the fact that the specific case isn't realistic/the user is ranting/the user is making false claims etc?
Example 2: an user thinks someone is gaming the system to his disadvantage, causing some irregularities in a way the system cannot catch. He creates a new question "what to do" or even "how can we prevent this" and then illustrate its own case. Other users quickliy notice that the example is wrong - the user didn't notice some detail that make the irregularity impossible in that case. Still, the irregularity is possible and someone may face it in the future.
From my observation, most time such questions are going to meet heavy downvote, with answers and comments like "you are wrong" and son on. This sometime result in the original problem being ignored. At this point, latter better and more generic versions of the question are often closed as dupes of the original one. But in doing so, the question remains unanswered.
The only solution that I see right now is either editing out the case specific part of the question so that only the general problem remains or repost the generic problem as a new (maybe wiki?) question and close the case specific one as a dupe (which probably would require coordinated effort from multiple users or a dupe hammer so that the new better version isn't closed as a dupe of the old one before the opposite can be done)... but neither seems really appropriate. Still, if we just vote for the poor exposition, we may miss an actual issue that may lie under the surface of the bad/wrong example.
I would be glad to see what the community thinks about this.
