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Yes! I read this question And it was useful, But this contains some old information, And I want the updated information.

What I want

  • I want to know existing canonical questions on our website.

  • I want to give some suggestions

  • I want to know How can I ask one canonical question.

1.What are existing canonical questions

I want to know what are existing canonical questions and is this a canonical question?

2.Suggestions

  • We should have a tag or some sort of a different library as a canonical question library browse through the tag or library and know if our question is already asked or not.

  • Every canonical question should have an automatic bounty of like 35 or 50 ( I mean if a user asks a question with a canonical tag the question should have a bounty from the system, not the s reputation )

  • People who are having above 300 reputations should have the privilege to ask and answer canonical questions.

How can I ask a canonical question

For an example This And this Are some same questions and have the same answer ( maybe I am wrong ) And even not these there are like hundreds of other questions with the same problem and answer. So I wanted to ask a question as I did here But it didn't seem to be working. So is there some special way to create a new canonical question?

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  • So ask some questions. What is the problem?
    – Pilot6
    Commented Oct 22, 2021 at 11:29
  • You already read a link to an example list of canonical questions. It is really unclear to me what you need. There is no feature to mark questions as "canonical" and as far as I know it is not planned. You are welcome to ask questions. Some of them may become "canonical" ;-)
    – Pilot6
    Commented Oct 22, 2021 at 11:36
  • I have no idea. Why do you care about that? There is no strict criteria.
    – Pilot6
    Commented Oct 22, 2021 at 11:42
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    I read that question. If you want my opinion... It is a dupe of askubuntu.com/q/235279/167850 And there is no easy way to answer why each and every wireless device isn't working.
    – Pilot6
    Commented Oct 22, 2021 at 11:45
  • I upvoted chili555's answer ;-) But the question is a dupe. If you have a better answer, you can post one to the old question. But really the question is too broad. To start troubleshooting one needs to identify the hardware. That's all that can be covered by one question.
    – Pilot6
    Commented Oct 22, 2021 at 12:15
  • You don't need to do anything. The question will stay and is useful enough, it also will point to the dupe. I don't see any downvotes.
    – Pilot6
    Commented Oct 22, 2021 at 12:19
  • Yes, I upvoted. It was a good try, but the question is to broad imho. There is a ton of questions about non-working Wi-Fi. It is not possible to cover it in one place. But you can try and write an answer ))
    – Pilot6
    Commented Oct 22, 2021 at 12:22

2 Answers 2

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To my experience with Ask Ubuntu

  • Canonical Question is a normal question in Ask Ubuntu. They are not featured by the Stack Exchange QA system (with a label or flag) but by Users.

  • There is no static list that can hold all of them and community can't keep it updated at least.

    Many of them can be found using "Most Frequent" or "Most Votes" search filter. I would like to see a filter for Most Answers too.

  • Publishing one? yes it is possible but hard and difficult. It needs efforts and some time.

    It needs to cover the issue well: explaining it and solve wider range of similar cases. Many of these had been written after multiple issue facing cycles and re-tuned many times over the years (edited, re-tagged, merged, some converted to wiki)

    Hardware related questions are rarely go canonical. Example WiFi, chips has relatively short support life from manufacturer beside the multiple way they were integrated in the system: PCI bus or PCIe bus, or connected via USB, PC Card, ExpressCard, Mini PCIe or M.2. Not forgetting the software stack which is evolving fast.

    Think of it as making a resumed troubleshooting flowchart. Good start is to discuss and try solve a specific type of issues for sometime. You could also join site Chat.

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@user.dz's answer is all good, but I want to add (opinionated) reasons why your approach will be hard to achieve.

  1. You have a lot of meta-information in your question's body. Out of the whole text, the only relevant part is "What's the best way to troubleshoot a non-functional WiFi?". When users are looking for an answer to their problem, they need to figure out if that question tackles the same issue they are facing. Users will most likely ignore it and move on with so much extra text.
  2. A canonical question is a question that needs to cover as many scenarios as possible so other questions can be duped into it. As @Pilot6 mentioned in the comments to this question, troubleshooting WiFi is a broad topic. But maybe it is possible to start somewhere.
  3. A similar question already exists My WiFi adapter is not working at all, how to troubleshoot?, has 321k views, 63 upvotes and an answer with 83 upvotes. Outdated or not, creating a new question is not how this site works. Users will ignore your new question and try the upvoted instead until they fail.
  4. Asking a new question because it is asked too many times doesn't help. Good canonical questions, although possible, don't start as a canonical question. They almost always begin as a standard question that gets edited to become canonical.
  5. Making a question a proper canonical one requires a bit of investment. Offering bounties is the best way to achieve that.

Having said all that, the question posted by Pilot6 is a good candidate if you want to have a canonical question for this topic. You shouldn't ignore it because the answer is outdated. However, it would be best to create a bounty on that question for people to give it more attention as it will get pinned for a week in the "Bountied" tab. There's even a bounty reason called "Current answers are outdated".

I would vote to close your question as a dupe to the other one, but seeing that it has a good answer now, I would instead flag it for merge.

Final note: There was another meta-question here about that specific question a short while ago that is worth the read as well: Which is better: editing someone's old but outdated answer to keep it up to date or making a new answer and adding a note to the old one?

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