Suggestions to improve the use and the findability of canonical questions

Question

2 suggestions for canonical questions:

1. The recently established canonical question for field switching after PhD has the following added to note to close voters:

   Questions about switching from X to Y may be closed as a duplicate of this. However, please be sure that the below answer actually answers OP's question before voting to close! If the question asks about something not covered below (other than the specific fields), the question should be left open until its answers are merged into this canonical question.

   I think that is a great addition and should be included in all canonical questions, as I have the feeling that often, questions that kind of fall into canonical territory get closed even though the specific answer is not (yet satisfactory) included in the canonical answer (the journal workflow is one of those).

2. Although canonical questions do exist, they are not easy to find as the float around in the sea of questions indistinguishable from other, non-canonical questions unless you actively click on them. My suggestion for making the canonical questions more "findable" would be to simply create a tag named canonical and ad this tag to all the canonical questions, with an explanation in the tag wiki on how canonical questions work, how people are invited to add to them etc.

Answer 1

Thanks for your suggestions. I'll write my responses in two different answers, so people can upvote/downvote individually.

I agree we should add some version of the quoted text to each canonical question. Naturally, we'll have to think a little bit carefully about phrasing these: we should try to be clear about which questions are merely "specific instances" of the canonical question (and should be closed) and which are asking for general information that should be in the canonical answer but isn't.

Along similar lines, I like how the newest canonical question's "notice to readers" paragraph gives a brief explanation for why questions about switching from X to Y are now considered duplicates of the canonical question; this should reduce confusion / annoyance when someone's specific question is closed as a "duplicate" of the much broader question. We should make sure the other canonical questions have something similar.

Answer 2

We already have a list of canonical questions. The advantage of this (over a tag) is that it can be sorted by category and similar. The obvious problem is that users are not sufficiently aware of this list or otherwise don’t know where to look for canonical questions.

If we add a banner to canonical questions, we can also include a link to this list. This should obviate the need for a specific tag, as it is then visible on every canonical question, just like the tag. This way we avoid the problems of a tag, like mistagged questions, the tag being removed, etc.

Answer 3

Thanks for your suggestions. I'll write my responses in two different answers, so people can upvote/downvote individually.

I agree the "canonical question" tag is probably a good idea. But, there are some potential issues we should be aware of.

First, meta-tags have been banned from Stack Overflow and are explicitly discouraged elsewhere. Looking through the rationale, many of the concerns would not apply to a canonical-question tag, but this ones does: "The reason meta-tags are a problem is that they do not describe the content of the question. They describe some other aspect of the question, like the author’s skill level, or the author’s motivation for asking it, or generally what 'kind' of question it is (poll, how-to, etc.)." I think creating a singular meta-tag is probably not a terrible idea notwithstanding the above, but we should be clear that this is a singular event and not a precedent.

Second, there is concern that novice users will misuse this tag and make random questions "canonical." Mod-only tags were suggested a year ago; I think mod-only tags are a fine idea, but they would have to be implemented by the StackExchange developers, which would take years (if they agree to do it at all, which I think is unlikely given the above). So, we would have to manually detect and remove incorrect applications of this tag; this is a bit of a maintenance burden (though I think it's probably worth it in this case; people have been complaining about how difficult it is to find canonical questions for years).

Answer 4

canonical questions do exist, they are not easy to find

My suggestion is: This is not a bug. Canonical questions are the same as every other question, except that they have been discussed on the meta site. They do not need special treatment.

The good ones are easy to find because there are many duplicates pointing to them.

Answer 5

However, please be sure that the below answer actually answers OP's question before voting to close!

This is wrong.

• When voting to close, you are voting for a duplicate question, not a duplicate answer.
• If two questions are the same, or should have the same answer, then they are duplicates, even if no answers exist in the site. This rule should apply to all questions, canonical or not.