community-faq is a useless meta tag primarily serving the older users

Question

There should be no reason to have and maintain community-faq as a living tag. Certainly not to continue pasting a boilerplate into questions themselves explaining the tag's usage.

Yes, it spawned out of wanting to create community FAQs, but this is already served by the frequent tab which is driven by links and references from actual use. Not by decree or one person but by the Super User community.

community-faq is also redundant when you look at all the questions that are on the frequent tab.

The tag's use is also primarily for those who want to look for a master question to mark duplicates against. As such, it's not useful for new users as a point of reference. A new user would not search for "community-faq" when their problem is about low battery usage. They'd search for "battery" or "batteries".

If we need to track which question(s) best cover or explain whatever problem is out there, then it should be part of the tag wiki.

The virus tag wiki has been made one of those kinds of examples. A use case designed for such.

It's of the community and of the site and not just a dump explaining what the tag is, but how to best use the tag. And here, one of the best uses of the tag is the drill down over to the master reference list that duplicates might be caught as.

Answer 1

Canonical Q&A

It doesn't make sense to not have a collection of canonical Q&A that is easy to find, and easy to find the specific question within. It would be great if newcomers to the site could access the information in an intuitive way to see if their question is already answered. Short of that, more experienced users should be able to find these to suggest a starting point for the OP and to close duplicates. It would be great if access to this was through a tab on the main page. But we don't have this.

What we have is an arcane index system that no newcomer would understand and only the most experienced users are fluent at using. It requires a coded, multi-parameter search, often followed by reviewing numerous questions to find the applicable one.

Community-faq

Community-faq was an attempt to at least label the canonical Q&A, and since there aren't that many entries, it isn't too hard to scan through them (or add another search parameter). However, there aren't that many of the common questions that have received definitive answers and been tagged. So community-faq is not a good solution, at least now (and never will be if we close it).

Frequent Tab

The "frequent" tab is pretty good. But it exists only for tags, not for search terms. I have no idea what "links" means, and can't find a definition (citations? views? identified as a duplicate?), but it conveys a general sense of relevance. It can't be combined with search terms.

Search

For search terms, you could use the "votes" tab to get close, although there is a lot of noise because definitive answers aren't always heavily upvoted, and the oddest posts often become wildly popular.

Tag Wiki

Using the tag wiki, like the virus example, could eventually be useful, at least for experienced users; no newcomer would think to look there. But until most of the canonical Q&A is listed in the wikis, nobody will bother to look there. Plus, this is tied to single tags, which are often much broader than search terms.

Conclusion

So getting back to community-faq, yeah, it's a lousy meta tag. It's the worst solution except for all of the others. And it does have several advantages. You can combine it with other search terms, and it is easy to add questions to the collection using the existing infrastructure.

Recommendation

Right now, we don't have a good solution implemented for canonical Q&A. My suggestion is to pick a solution and develop it. In the meantime, encourage building the community-faq collection, like DragonLord recently started to do. When we have a good solution, the community-faq will be a ready-made collection to populate it.