It's always handy to have a go-to Community FAQ / Community Wiki question in case another "Alternative to …" / "Recommend me …" question shows up. The problem is that:
- We won't be able to create one for every possible application or tag
- We're essentially creating the kind of Q&A posts we do not want
The FAQ is still very unclear about software recommendations. While plain "recommend me …" is definitely off topic and will always be, many "Looking for alternative to …" questions still slip through.
If we filled those empty and meaningless tag wikis with valuable content, we could easily be more strict in terms of moderation and shut down these questions – even without having a duplicate ready.
So, yes, let's do it. If we do this, we should keep the following in mind though:
Tag wikis are probably third class citizen
I think it's reasonable to say that – at least currently – only a small portion of our users reads and curates tag wikis. Only their excerpts are visible on the front page. Some users that see those excerpts while typing in tags still get their tags wrong. We can assume they wouldn't even click on the "Info" button to see more.
We therefore need to promote them as much as we can. First of all, by adding information. Second, by linking to what we have on the front page.
Not abusing the tag wikis by including too much information
Nobody will read walls of text, few will care to write them in the first place. There's no real gain involved (+2 for an initial write-up), no public user name shown, et cetera.
If we have great stuff to write about, make it a post on the Super User blog. If there's a question specific enough so that it can't be answered by a brief canonical tag wiki write-up or basic research, it probably deserves to be a question on the main site and we can deal with it on a case-by-case basis.
Tag wikis are no answers
They should be as canonical as possible. In very rare cases, the existing answers we have on the main site are a good fit for a tag wiki. There's no question to be answered, therefore the content should probably be written without having a question in mind.
Let's think about the average user who comes here, being redirected through the tag itself or a friendly reminder about the FAQ and which topics are off-topic.
Being critical about suggested edits
There's no place for "I recommend …" here. Alternatives and frequently used programs should rather be selected and sorted by objective measures. Minor edits should still be rejected, and recent approvals should be tracked so a peer review of the review process itself becomes possible as well.