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I happened to see the question Widgets for promoting Ubuntu on your website. In the question it states:

This is a collection for promoting Ubuntu on your website. If you have the rep, please enter the source in this post, rather than in an answer. If not, then post it as an answer and someone else will move it in here.

Personally I'm not really a fan of this . I see no reason for that question to exist with people answering 'normally'.

Just wondering what others views are (and perhaps how this is done elsewhere on Stack Exchange).

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It's been tried on other sites (my experience is mainly SO and meta.SO), but it consistently seems to work better to not do this.

Ask Ubuntu is a question and answer site, and we should keep that focus rather than trying to be everything for everyone. Ask Ubuntu doesn't have to be and shouldn't be the only Ubuntu resource people use. (I've said similar things about SO before.) Ubuntu in particular has a dedicated wiki for other, non-Q&A types of content.

This shows, probably better than I can, the focus of Stack Exchange:

This isn't really a place for broad introspection. It's problem specific. You come here because you have a detailed problem or narrow question you want to answer.
  — Jeff Atwood

Even our FAQ questions should follow the "Jeopardy principle":

It's also perfectly fine to ask and answer your own question, as long as you pretend you're on Jeopardy: phrase it in the form of a question.

In cases such as FAQs, it makes sense to have one "primary" answer which is updated by everyone — and this is the point of CW — but they still ask a question in the question and provide answers with the answers. (It may be useful to look through the history of SO's community FAQ, which started on SO itself when SO was just a single site. However, much of the earliest history is only available to those with 10k rep as the questions have been migrated and deleted.)

Specifically about the on the question you mention: posting more answers which people incorporate into the question body simply won't work. This requires careful coordination from all posters to delete their answer once moved, but since that won't happen, it also requires a moderator spending lots of time maintaining just those questions. Neither is a good idea, and in practice will lead to detritus and a failed question.

There is a rep requirement to edit community wiki posts, but it's rather low at 100. This level reflects that you have some basic experience with Stack Exchange sites, such as the mechanics of markdown, asking, answering, commenting, etc. Remember you can start at 101 rep with enough experience on another SE site. If people are trying to reach 100 rep and failing, we have a much bigger and completely different problem.

I would vote to close as "not a real question":

It's difficult to tell what is being asked here. This question is ambiguous, vague, incomplete, overly broad, or rhetorical and cannot be reasonably answered in its current form.

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  • Another example of such a question: askubuntu.com/questions/9237/hot-features-of-ubuntu-closed
    – Roger Pate
    Commented Oct 24, 2010 at 22:06
  • I see that second question as fundamentally different to what we're talking about. The "hot" one is just a completely unanswerable question that I think was right to have been closed. On the other hand, the "Widgets" question was a perfectly valid question, the issue up for discussion in this "meta question" is the request everyone edited their answers into a single post.
    – 8128
    Commented Oct 25, 2010 at 7:10
  • @fluteflute: They're both discussion lists rather than questions, though one is phrased better than another. — Discussion is great, but it's not Q&A.
    – Roger Pate
    Commented Oct 25, 2010 at 7:42
  • I agree with you on everything except the fact that the "Widgets" question is a discussion question. There's a clear answerable question there, which I think should be allowed on the site.
    – 8128
    Commented Oct 25, 2010 at 7:48
  • @fluteflute: It fails subjective question guidelines 1, 2, 4, 5, and 6. (Linked in the FAQ.)
    – Roger Pate
    Commented Oct 25, 2010 at 7:51
  • The subjective question guidelines are only for subjective questions though. Either an answer is a "widget to promote Ubuntu on your website" or it is not - nothing subjective there (in my opinion).
    – 8128
    Commented Oct 25, 2010 at 7:54
  • @fluteflute: I understand the implied question (but the actual question body is poorly edited) to be along the lines of "what widgets should I use to promote Ubuntu on my website", which is subjective. Ask Ubuntu is not an encyclopedia to collect lists and without that implied question, it's not even a question at all.
    – Roger Pate
    Commented Oct 25, 2010 at 7:59
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    My discussion with Roger was continued in chat and as a result I reverted the question to an earlier revision.
    – 8128
    Commented Oct 25, 2010 at 8:39

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