I have noticed that there are a couple of questions appearing where people are essentially asking for lists of answers regarding what "your library" does in a particular situation.
These questions are somewhat problematic because there is no real answer to them - they are just going to be endless discussion style responses because there is no way to pick a true answer - you can't say that Library X does it better than Library Y, essentially, because of how the question has been asked. There is no way to select one answer as being the one true right answer, because they are all equally valid. They all respond to the question of "what does your library do".
These questions are more suited for the realm of discussion and forums, which Stack Exchange is not.
I understand that we, as professionals in the Library and Information Science field, have a great interest in knowing how other groups do things, especially when formulating new policies in your own institution. Problem is, while sharing ideas and such is a great thing to do, it is not a really good fit for Stack Exchange.
What can we do to make these questions more on-topic, following the SE model? Can we do anything? Or should they just be closed?
Ashley Nunn
So here's the fallacy of the 'only one right answer' type question.
There's always more than one way to do things. The 'correct' answer that gets marked in Stack Exchange isn't necessarily the one that best answers the question (as a better answer might be given after another answer has been marked as correct)
So, what we're really asking is, 'does anyone else have a workable solution to this problem?' or 'what are my options for dealing with this situation?', and then choosing the one that you believe best fits your circumstances (which may or may not be reflected in the question asked).
I've had times when I've marked a question as correct, as it looked correct on the surface, but it was more pseudocode, and was missing the outer calling structure ... and when I actually got the necessary bits to run it I found my performance went from 10k operations per second to 1 per second. Had I been more skilled in Postgres, I might not've marked the answer as correct, and left it open in hopes of more answers that might've solved the problem.
So, my answer :
(and if the Stack Exchange people think I'm off base on the no correct answer thing, go and take a look at the most recent questions on Stack Overflow -- every 'how can I get this to work?' or 'how can I do (x)?' question fits, the only difference is with software, we can verify it's an acceptable answer with a quick compile & test)
There's a very fine line to be drawn between questions where that's an okay thing to include and questions where that's not. This is essentially the same line as the one between good, constructive, subjective questions and bad, non-constructive, subjective questions. For example, from "Real Questions Have Answers":
Constructive subjective questions:
- inspire answers that explain “whyand “how”.
- tend to have long, not short, answers.
- have a constructive, fair, and impartial tone.
- invite sharing experiences over opinions.
- insist that opinion be backed up with facts and references.
- are more than just mindless social fun.
So, if a subjective question is best answered with experience, with explanation of why and how that experience was superior, and with facts and references backing up its backs up its claif superiority, then, yes, "If you've had success with this, how did you do it?" and related guiding questions can be a useful part of a good, constructive, subjective question.
On the other hand, it's a bad, non-constructive, subjective question if the question does not ask for a how or a why or facts or references or just lack the right tone or it fits these other points from Real Questions Have Answers:
To prevent your question from being flagged and possibly removed, avoid asking subjective questions where …
- every answer is equally valid: “What’s your favorite __?”
- your answer is provided along with the question, and you expect more answers: “I use _ for _, what do you use?”
I fully agree with you that there is a category of non-constructive poll questions that need to be reformed or closed/deleted. However, I wouldn't be too hasty here, not just because nions that use "you" or "your" are going to be such questions but because we're dealing with a discipline that has some highly subjective areas in it and "How we done it good" is actually considered a perfectly valid type of formal article because there is no other way of answering some questions in this discipline. If SE wants to be a collection of expert answers to canonical questions, well, this is what those things look like sometimes.
Hmmm. Well, I pretty much signed up to SE to figure out how other librarians are dealing with similar issues that I am facing--through a question and answer format.
Given that the highest viewed question on the site is definitely one of these types of questions under scrutiny, I would suggest that the problem isn't these "types" of questions, but the types of answers they attract. I asked it because I was simply curious, and a lot of people gave a lot of great answers. However, each answer was specific to an organization and ignored the other responses or even a general approach that could be taken. I noticed this and commented on it a while back, but have avoided giving the thread a "best answer" because those who answered were only able to share THEIR solution. I think someone could go onto that thread right now, summarize the responses, (e.g. "Well some people have done this, and some people have done this... and here is a note to consider...") then I would likely find that to be a "best answer" because that is the type of answer I was expecting when I asked the question.