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Here's my thought process on this:

We've got some general questions out there that keep popping up. Like the, infamous PC freezing questions I brought up earlier in the year. At that time we decided to make a set of general questions that were made 'community wiki' to answer basic procedures of common issues like this. In the case of the PC freezing dilemma we setup these three questions:

While these questions are great, I suggest we take it a step further. Why don't we use the blog to answer questions like these, where an explanation/answer is difficult to come to without a ton of explanation?

Once a blog post has been written and approved by experienced users, we could start linking questions of the such to the blog post for general answering thus leaving more room to focus on the specifics of the question the OP has.

What do you think?

NOTE: If the community thinks this is a good suggestion then I will post regarding proper procedure

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    Taking down How-To Geek one post at a time!
    – random Mod
    Commented Mar 28, 2011 at 4:11
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    Not to be nitpicky, but those questions are supposed to be community-faqs aren't they?
    – Ivo Flipse Mod
    Commented Mar 28, 2011 at 11:25

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Hmm. I'm not sure about this. I think I would prefer that we pursue the concept of "canonical questions" ..

Help us build a great library of canonical answers. If you keep seeing the same form of questions, whether it’s mod_rewrite rules on Server Fault, freezing computers on Super User, or how to use regular expressions to parse HTML, write a great, canonical answer, once and for all. Make it community wiki so that as many other people as possible can make it great. Work really hard on writing something that is clear, concise, and understandable by as wide an audience as possible.

.. as actual, answered questions on Super User.

There are plenty of great topics for blog posts that can hopefully go far above and beyond being a mere reference answer for common questions.

In other words, I think it's fair to use the blog as a reference for answers -- just like we'd use any other external site, including How-To Geek, but positioning it as the "only" answer is going a bit too far.

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    I agree that it's important to have this content on the site, but does the order in which it happens matter? Because else I would slave drive some of the writers into making the blog post first and then feed back that content to the appropriate questions/answers
    – Ivo Flipse Mod
    Commented Mar 29, 2011 at 18:41
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    I like this idea. I wasn't proposing that we altogether get rid of these questions, but rather start trying to avert the need for long tailed questions. Creating content for the blog as a reference for future and current questions is the better goal.
    – James Mertz
    Commented Mar 29, 2011 at 19:09

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