4

I have posted a question, but i see there is some uncertainty as to how we respond to them.

What will our policy be concerning these potentially open ended questions? I know of another SE site that seems to be able to handle them.

EDIT:
There seems to be a move for the tag to supersede the tag for these types of questions, but my concerns still apply. How will we handle these types of questions to make it clear to newcomers what our policy is?

2

Is there really any uncertainty over how to respond to them? Aside from the bridge question, I think our building questions have been well-written and tightly scoped.

Obviously people can have different opinions about styles, resulting in very different suggestions. That doesn't make the question subjective, any more than any e.g. programming question is subjective. Just because there are several good, conflicting answers doesn't mean there are not objective standards to separate good and bad answers, nor that the asker and community cannot use their own opinions to promote or demote answers. Rather, that's the point of crowdsourcing. Problems arise when there are dozens of answers and no way to decide between them. I expect there are probably at most five ways to build a sphere, and ten ways to build a micro-scale crypt, and the situations askers and voters find themselves in provide enough objective criteria to make a good decision between those.

This is also why there's two axes of rating answers on SE sites. The first is, what was the best answer for the asker? And the second is, what does the community deem the best answer? The former is decided by the answer tick and the second is decided by voting.

  • 2
    I think what we also need is encourage people to answer these even when there are already good answers - because they will have a different take on the question. I would love to see the Heroica graveyard/crypt one, for example, with dozens of answers. – Joubarc Nov 13 '11 at 17:21
  • I wouldn't. If there's dozens of answers, either the question was too broad, or most of the answers are terrible. – user23 Nov 13 '11 at 17:51
  • 1
    OK, maybe not dozens, but two is certainly not enough – Joubarc Nov 14 '11 at 4:55
  • 2
    I'm with @Joubarc on this - I'd love to see some more answers, which is why I've not yet accepted either. I agree that by opening it up to "Crypts" as well as "Graveyards", I may have made it too broad :( – Zhaph - Ben Duguid♦ Nov 14 '11 at 9:59
1

It's a good question, and one that we'd started discussing a bit in chat too - a bit similar to the more general question raised on "open ended questions".

The tag is almost a "meta" tag, and as such has debatable use - if we keep the questions using it tightly focused, it could be quite useful.

That said, while Oezi's answer is the most correct (with a direct link to the building instructions), I'd like to see a little more detail in there (I'm building some examples in LDD to add to the answer).

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .