Questions tagged [canonical]
A canonical is a question with one or more high quality (often authorative) answers which serves to answer the most common (sub)questions about a certain topic. Other questions about the same topic can then be closed as a duplicate of this question, increasing the maintainability.
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120 views
Please post here your site's useful lists of canonical posts, potential duplicate targets, faq, etc [closed]
Please post here your site's master list of basics that are used to refer participants to. The name is not the most important thing! It might be called potential duplicate targets, reference list, ...
9
votes
2answers
115 views
What is the course of action if I find a better duplicate for a question already closed as duplicate?
What to do when I find a duplicate question - often already marked as duplicate, and I find that the question is indeed a duplicate, but much better answered in a different question, so that it may be ...
8
votes
1answer
63 views
Findable canonical questions?
Today I wrote about a possible Achievements dialogue sum error which was duped to "New top bar can't math." As James Webster and Cruncher point out there, the title is intended to be humorous, but it ...
2
votes
1answer
126 views
Cataloging Canonical Answers
I was dismayed to find this (now old) feature-request declined: Another take on canonical answers: Add a "canonical" vote (... and this similar feature-request yet-to-be-addressed: Canonical ...
5
votes
1answer
148 views
How to approach asking and answering a canonical question?
Background: Over at Arqade, I've noticed an increasing number of questions about Clash Of Clans asking how to recover their lost account. These questions are not closed as duplicates since each case ...
4
votes
1answer
96 views
Seeking canonical answer on why the OP can edit/change their question after it has answers
In one of the sites I'm active in I see fairly regular comments by some contributors that they hate that people can edit their questions.
Now I intuitively grok why this is a good policy but I don't ...
3
votes
2answers
76 views
Spend some of my rep to promote my answer?
Let's say there's an issue for which there are a few duplicate questions, but there's no canonical answer. So I spend some time writing an answer of which I'm proud. No, really proud.
But now it will ...
2
votes
1answer
55 views
Is it acceptable to close HTML parsing questions as a duplicate of a Canonical?
Consider the following example:
How do I get the attributes of all the <span> tags from a string containing HTML markup? I've tried the following solution, but it doesn't work as I want it. How ...
23
votes
1answer
156 views
Audits and the "canonical question" bug
I just got a failed audit for this question, which showed up as a "first post" (and the audit system, as it does, lied and said that it had no upvotes and no answers). I intended to mark the ...
-16
votes
2answers
363 views
Encourage the posting of Canonical Questions by making "Answer Your Own Question" posts Community Wiki automatically
Here on Meta, we have a faq tag.
It contains many topics that describe in high-quality detail how the SE network functions. By convention, we mark these posts Community Wiki and protect them. ...
2
votes
1answer
147 views
Canonical "floating point comparison" question?
We got another “my floating point values don’t compare as equal” question again today.
When we get a “Null reference exception” question I often point them to John Saunders’ excellent canonical ...
2
votes
1answer
93 views
Why Did I Get a "Great Answer" Badge for a CW Answer? [duplicate]
I posted "What is a NullReferenceException in .NET?" as a place for canonical answers to this canonical question. In fact, most of the answers here are not from me.
Why in the world did this earn me ...
6
votes
1answer
90 views
Link Exact Duplicates to a Single Reference Question
There seems to be a rapidly growing number of routine duplicate questions. For example, I collected a list of 20 questions similar to the debate about "Storing Images in Database or File System" in ...
6
votes
1answer
124 views
Request for question reopen/undelete and preservation [closed]
The old question Should a function have only one return statement? has been closed as Not Constructive, and it has been deleted.
Let's examine that - is it really not constructive? Well, yes and no: ...
10
votes
0answers
111 views
Encyclopedia Stack Exchange and the Canonical Answer [duplicate]
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 ...
12
votes
1answer
694 views
Introduce a Canonical Question tag [closed]
How about introducing canonical-question to Stack Overflow in order to make it easier to identify them?
The general idea is to have either moderators designate individual canonicals and/or auto tag ...
12
votes
0answers
257 views
Creating an FAQ post to answer the CSS question: "How do I center something?" [closed]
One of the most common CSS questions on Stack Overflow is about centering in some form. It can often be confusing, because there are several interpretations of what it means to be "centered" and each ...
96
votes
6answers
953 views
Another take on canonical answers: Add a "canonical" vote
When closing a question as a duplicate, it is becoming harder and harder to search for a good original as the pool of questions and answers grows and grows.
While the new dupe closing dialog is a ...
9
votes
2answers
301 views
Canonical "Ajax is asynchronous" answer? [closed]
I see a lot of questions (e.g. here or here, just in the past couple of hours) where the poster is making an Ajax call within a function (and doing something with the results in a callback) and doesn'...
17
votes
3answers
1k views
Canonical answers for repeated questions
I know this question I'm proposing has some variants, but none had an answer that could solve the problem. Some others like this one: Here and Here
There are these questions (from newcomers who can ...
17
votes
1answer
299 views
I want to know how duplicious a question is, and if it is the best example of such
Closing as dupe is one of the harder things high-rep users and moderators do. It involves a lot of judgement in order to be done right.
We have to determine how close of a duplicate a question is. ...
4
votes
0answers
56 views
Order of Tagged Questions irrelevant?
When filtering by tags it doesn't appear that the order of the tags makes a difference. Eg C#, .NET returns exactly the same page as .NET, C#. While I agree with this, it means that both pages end up ...
22
votes
5answers
4k views
Where to post a "canonical answer" when it's not in response to a specific question?
Per this SO Blog post, I've been working for about 2 weeks on trying to get Ajax uploading of files to work in Rails 3 using Paperclip to manage attachments.
I finally found a solution that works ...
62
votes
7answers
1k views
The Wikipedia of Long Tail Programming Questions
So I have just read the newest blog entry and it seems to be addressing something I had brought up here before, namely a way to deal with the constant stream of duplicated questions. It's interesting, ...
8
votes
4answers
368 views
Should c++-faq tagged threads be made CW? [closed]
Yesterday I started this thread on Sequence Points and Undefined Behaviour and tagged it [c++-faq] after reading the following thread created by reputed member of the C++ community(tag) sbi
Setting ...
2
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1answer
75 views
Community Wiki and FAQs
If I have a FAQ or some little known information should I phrase my question as a FAQ instead of a question when posting on Stack Overflow or is this type of post frowned upon?
4
votes
1answer
70 views
FAQs as discussion items
The presence of lengthy and contentious debates on FAQ questions here is confusing. I note in particular the FAQ on community wiki. Shog9 tried to help this with a link in his answer, but the link is ...
10
votes
3answers
177 views
Should there be an incentive to generalize questions?
So you dug yourself into a hole and are desperate enough to ask a question on Stack Overflow. Someone can answer your question in a much more general way you thought about the problem.
Now the ...
5
votes
3answers
141 views
Wiki pages on Stack Exchange
Wouldn't it be nice to have a page with just the answer (and maybe the questions) for some topics.
The fact that there has been an extensive discussion about a question isn't always relevant to ...
8
votes
1answer
216 views
Guideline: Merging SO Questions / Answers
I tried to find a pre-existing question for this but couldn't find one... if there is one, consider this ironic.
I was wondering if there is a guideline / strategy / recommendation of how to deal with ...
6
votes
3answers
189 views
Would it be useful to be able to vote for Canonical answers? [duplicate]
I've added a suggestion on User Voice to consider the possibility of categorizing up to one answer per question as Canonical — i.e. worthy of being considered the consensus complete and accurate ...