[rzwitserloot]

A trivial solution to this dilemma seems to be to consider stack overflow a place for the former, and have a system in place where you can vote specifically to elevate a question to the latter category. (god knows they don't mind adding stuff, with comments, votes on comments, votes on questions, on answers, votes on closing questions, votes on reopening them... – surely yet another kind of vote wouldn't bother them!)

Such an elevation may require some small edits. This adds all sorts of benefits:

1. Given that it is now clear that the question is moving from 'this answers the question asked by the original poster' to 'this is now like a blog post, generally useful information that should score highly on google', it is completely fine to edit the question and turn it into something that no longer entirely matches the original asker. I'd even go so far as to clone the question, and leave the real question unmolested.

2. The question (or, better yet, an answer) can be marked as obsoleted or outdated. There are huge swaths of questions on SO that have a ton of votes and an answer that was fantastic in the past, but is now flat out misleading or wrong, but it seems both onerous to begin the path of finding a few thousand people to downvote it, as well as 'mean' to the poster of that answer, and tricky for the historic purposes of the internet (imagine a fix in some source code has a comment that links to this answer!) - and for similar reasons, editing the answer so that it is nothing like the original answer is also flat out bizarre. It'd be so much better if it was possible to vote an answer as 'obsolete' or 'outdated'. But that doesn't work if SO is at odds with itself and at once a repo of common questions AND a specific question->specific answer forum.

3. Given that an SO community now has a presumably much smaller set of questions-with-answers that have been elevated to 'commonly asked question with great curated answers', they can 'police' their fiefdom of curated general knowledge vastly better, with mods and random passersby invited to ocassionally inspect one of these curated answers and see if it still seems useful, applicable, and correct in the current day and age. It also becomes far more feasible to browse through the entirety of the curated questions list.

[dmurray]

This already exists as "Community wiki" [0], which is almost exactly what you describe, at least in theory.

It seems like a useful feature that often has a positive effect. It's not clear to be that it's improved the general attitude of the community or of management.

[0] https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11740/what-are-comm...

[the_jeremy]

The community wiki is strange to me because it completely removes the gamification aspect. If your post becomes a community wiki, you stop getting reputation. If you edit a community wiki, you get no reputation.

[rzwitserloot]

Ah, very interesting.

But does it matter? The SO I know still aggressively hints at the 'I dont know what we actually are' problem; if you answer very obvious questions, you get downvoted with notes to 'VTC and move on', for example. I also get no option to vote to promote an answer into the wiki.

The community wiki feature as implemented does not fulfill what I'm proposing, I'd say. Or at least, the current policies do not mesh with the existence of the wiki in a way to solve the dilemma.

[ballenf]

I don't think community wiki's are what was described at all.

I'd describe as every question starting out as a forum post and only upvoted questions become Questions.

No one's question gets deleted. Question quality doesn't get diluted.

[richardw]

I was active from very early on but lost trust in SO when my best answer got turned into a community wiki. It’s an amazing resource but now I mostly consume.