Re-evaluating [tips] and tip-like questions

Question

Currently, all tips questions on the main site are Community Wiki. Furthermore, there are not many other non-challenge questions on the main site. These types of questions are generally supressed on PPCG.

This should change.

The first point I'm going to attack is the fact that tips questions are CW. This is wrong!

• Community Wiki is meant for posts that are created and maintained by the community, wiki-style. (Hence the name.) From this blog post about community wiki:

  Community wiki is for that rare gem of a post that needs true community collaboration. That’s when community wiki shines.

  The CW checkbox on questions was removed for a reason - it's being misused. tips questions are not wiki-type articles! Each answer has one tip, and that tip is "owned" by its original author. The question is still "owned" by the asker of the question.

• From this Meta SE post on what the purpose of CW is:

  To allow anyone to collaboratively edit a question or answer.

  That's not what tips questions are! The question is still the OP's own question, and the answers are still the answerers' own ideas and tips. Since each answer has one tip, there's no need to enable collaborative editing.

Now that that's out of the way, let's talk about other tips-like questions.

Why do challenges have to be the only thing ever posted on PPCG? Can't there be questions too? Can there not be questions...

• about tips about golfing (which we have already)?
• about creating golfing languages (not a specific one, but in general, i.e. how to handle I/O, how to create a generic string/array slicing method, etc.)?
• about how to make something [more obfuscated/shorter/...] (i.e. how to make shuffling an array shorter)?
• about making specific constructs shorter (i.e. long strings and compressing them, nested loops, etc.)?
• about strategies to solve a specific type of programming puzzle?
• about the history of golfing (I know, sounds boring, but some people might be interested)?

Etc., etc., etc.?

This would a.) Increase the question volume, which we direly need, and b.) Draw a bigger audience into the site (the audience that doesn't know how to golf or solve programming puzzles, and wants to learn more).

The advantages far outweight the (nonexistent) disadvantages. So why not?

This meta post is related, but it's asking about a question not really about the process of golfing, but about character counting which only happens to be used in golfing. (Also it's from 3 years ago.)

^{(Please don't get me started on posting these on meta. Meta is for discussion about the SE site PPCG, not discussion about programming puzzles / golfing. Just... no.)}

Answer 1

Hm, the existing answers kind of focus on allowing non-list tips questions or allowing tips-question at all, with some peripheral notes about community wiki. Furthermore, the general question of what sort of non-challenge questions we want has been determined in detail in the meantime. So that's sort of off the table.

Since the question about community wikis was your first point, I thought I'd make an answer for this, so people can vote on it to show their opinion specifically about this.

Tips questions should not be community wikis

Essentially, because of the arguments given in the question itself: answers to tips questions aren't usually maintained collaboratively. Since a good tips answer will only contain a single tip and not a list (to allow more useful tips to bubble up through votes), it's also quite unlikely that we'll see massive collaborative editing of these in the future. The people who come up with these and write them up deserve the rep for that. In fact, now that we do allow single-purpose tips questions ("How can I shorten this snippet in language X?"), nobody has any objections to people answering those getting rep.

Rainbolt's suggestion of making the questions CW but the answers not seems very reasonable from a rep perspective (people will upvote the question because they found the list useful, but there's really no effort on the side of the question asker, since they all use the same boilerplate). However, I think this is simply impractical, because answers to CW questions are automatically CW, so a mod would have to monitor them and un-CW every new answer manually. Giving the question asker a little extra rep seems like the much better alternative, and it doesn't exactly do any harm. As Doorknob said in a comment, if you don't want them to get rep for it, don't upvote the question.

Answer 2

I might want to use the main site to ask questions like, "Why do some method calls in Ruby need parentheses?", or, "Which languages win most often at code golf?" These would be tips.

I would probably use meta for questions about the rules for code challenges. Questions like, "My program doesn't allow \0 in strings," or, "How to count invalid characters in UTF-8?"

Putting "tips for language X" in community wiki seems useful. For example, in tips for golfing in Ruby:

• I expanded the tip about Kernel#p though I am not the person who created the answer.
• I edited the tip about $_ for the difference between Ruby 1.8 and 1.9.

I am not sure whether other questions in tips (that are not "tips for language X") should be community wiki. If "tips for language X" was no longer community wiki, I would stop editing answers and start adding comments.

Answer 3

How to answer all challenges is site level, not challenge level.

This abstraction is the one that my brain told me was the way to organize things, but it appears to be lost in a tangled web of lawyery phrases by others.

I understand that you can word it differently and get a different result. For example, "Questions about golfing are not questions about the site." This has been beaten to death in chat, so let's agree to disagree here.

The author does not deserve rep for tips questions.

This is community consensus, and not just my opinion. Tips questions are boilerplate, copy and paste tasks that require no ingenuity from the author. On main, enforcing this requires additional restrictions, and moderator intervention if not followed. It was even abused earlier today by an alternate account of a currently active user in order to gain free rep.

The answers are a different story. They worked hard to generate their tips. I feel like they deserve a reward for the efforts, but then again I feel like everyone who makes great points on meta also deserves rep.

It looks like a polling question.

In this regard, it doesn't belong anywhere. However, it can be transformed into something that is not a polling question. If the question begged a single answer, edited by the community, that contains all tips for that language. This it would be a true community wiki both in spirit and in reality.

In summary, I'd like to see things marked Community Wiki actually be a community answer or question. I'd like to see rep abuses be made impossible (that means downvoting non CW tips questions if they are to remain on main). Finally, I have no qualms with tips questions remaining where they are (on Main), but I do take issue with those who claim that their view is the only view. Don't use your diamond or your 20k rep to tell me that my view is just wrong.