My answer: I'm not sure if I agree or not! Argl!
These are questions that lots of people want answers to. They're often highly voted for and some of our existing infinite-list-of-X (ILoX herein) questions are the most popular on the site in terms of traffic.
ILoX is widely regarded as a "bad thing" in the wider StackExchange community because it doesn't fit the Q/A format. Lots of sites shoot them on sight.
When we close NARQ and OT questions, we often tell the OP to go to UbuntuForums - but how is a forum structure any better than ours? If you look over UbuntuForums you'll see thousands of these questions and they bloat, stagnate and die in just the same way as they would here. At least we can rank answers.
By banning this style of question here and doing nothing else, we're blindly hoping that another segment of the community can fulfil the demand for answers but as I say, the alternatives to us are no better at handling the problem.
So yes. I'm in two minds between "Argl, this is somebody else's problem!" and "Argl, think of the users!". I think there are arguments for:
Embracing the demand and trying to enhance how we deal with ILoX questions. This does need work because infinite lists are very hard to browse and new (better) answers take a while to float to the top.
Edit: Computer Science Theory keep a
big-listmeta-tag and seems to allow them. Yeah I know everybody hates meta-tags but if we were to adopt something similar, it would help us monitor the usage.Finding a better solution in the community. My first thought for something better than both AU and UF was the oft-forgotten Wiki. MoinMoin is not my favourite format language but technically speaking it's slightly more adaptive than our version of Markdown. The challenge (that Jorge "Delete-a-wiki-page" Castro will hate) is maintaining these.
Converting our content out to the Wiki is one thing but it would be irresponsible (and a waste of our time) to push the content there and then just abandon it.
This isn't really an answer but I'd like to hope that some workable ideas can come from my rambling.
Edit: I've read Stack Overflow: Where We Hate Fun and like my opinion the answer is not cut-and-dry. Not all lists are evil, but that doesn't mean they all hold value either. The decision should come from a three-way balance between it fitting our remit, what the community wants and the actual value in the question.
Oli's Opinion-o-meter (last updated: 12.48UTC): Currently erring more toward saying we shouldn't just close all lists because they're lists. Chance of rain.
