Consider this question, which asks "will MacOS be supported in the future?" No more context except an Ubuntu-one tag. Obviously this is a slightly vague question and the person did not follow the recommendation in the question's title field which says "What's your ubuntu question? be specific." My impression is that this happens a lot, e.g. "Why doesn't Internet work on my Ubuntu?" These are worse and more typical than the above, which at least has an appropriate tag.

The catch-22 is that telling someone "be specific" is unlikely to help in the majority of cases. It's like telling a student with bad study habits to "study better". They don't know what that means. They need to be guided by the hand and told specifics of how to do so.

I noticed that Debian's "Ask" site has a much better (IMO) FAQ setup. Under the first section "How shall I ask my question?", it states "Include as much information as possible. If you ask question like "I can't open my fridge" we can't help you." On Ubuntu's main FAQ, to get to a section like that, you first have to scroll all the way down to "What if I don't get a good answer?" First, this suggests that users are just supposed to ask away and only if that fails are they supposed to read this. Second, after clicking on the follow up link, the first section is "Do your homework". The second section explains what being "specific" means, but surprisingly, without an example or much explanation. It's assumed the reader just needs a reminder to include details and not be vague.

Given all this (context for my question), let me be specific. What I want people to comment on is: Should the FAQ (and related things like the form field for questions and side-panel etc) be more geared toward getting people to ask more desciptive, less ambiguous questions?

I would think that's what we all want, but after examining the setup here, I am considering maybe Ask Ubuntu is purposefully set up to actually encourage a lot of noise, under the assumption that many people are incapable of following the guidelines without much prompting. So here's a second, related question:

Is Debian's FAQ format less "friendly"? Is that why Ubuntu's is different?

Debian's question box has above it: "What's your question? be descriptive." I think 'descriptive' is a lot better than 'specific'. It implies we want them to describe the problem, not just specify the categories of their problem (I noticed even vague questions often get appropriate tagging by the OP). What about changing "be specific" to "describe in detail"?