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  • 41
    +2 if I could. We really need this.
    – user50049
    Commented Apr 5, 2011 at 14:40
  • 12
    related suggestion: If General Reference becomes a close reason, add a field for an url like for duplicates
    – Borror0
    Commented Apr 5, 2011 at 15:00
  • 22
    This has one major flaw: Google it is specifically banned on SE.
    – Time Traveling Bobby
    Commented Apr 5, 2011 at 15:09
  • 16
    @Bobby there is a category of questions for which that rule needs to be reconsidered.
    – Pekka
    Commented Apr 5, 2011 at 15:16
  • 7
    @Bobby: Well, there was a blog post about it a month ago; since then, silence. blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/02/are-some-questions-too-simple
    – Piskvor left the building
    Commented Apr 5, 2011 at 15:19
  • 5
    @Pan yup, that's why I'm asking. Key quote from Jeff in that post: Do we really want to spoon-feed (or even encourage in any way) users so lazy they can’t find obvious Wikipedia pages? Or do even the most basic research before asking?
    – Pekka
    Commented Apr 5, 2011 at 15:22
  • 5
    -1 for suggesting weaponizing Community Wiki
    – Lance Roberts
    Commented Apr 22, 2011 at 19:03
  • 7
    The last sentence is a very bad idea. Some good answerers who may not know that something will be closed as "general reference" will get hosed, and then ticked off. You're asking them to be psychic.
    – Lance Roberts
    Commented Apr 22, 2011 at 19:11
  • 14
    @Lance I disagree. It doesn't take a psychic to tell these kinds of questions, just a bit of experience in the programming language, platform or library. If you know that they can be answered satisfactorily by a link to the manual, you know it's a general reference question. At the moment, you can easily earn 80-100 reputation points by telling somebody how to select an element by ID in jQuery, the most basic possible operation provided by the library. (I'm no exception, I have answered lots of those too.) That takes away the whole point of reputation as some measure of a bit of expertise
    – Pekka
    Commented Apr 22, 2011 at 19:15
  • 7
    @Pekka, I answer questions in VBA all the time, and finding MSDN links is a big pain. Microsoft also is the land of dead links, they're always changing them, so if we give links, they will die in time.
    – Lance Roberts
    Commented Apr 22, 2011 at 19:17
  • 4
    @Lance it's great to point out a link if the OP doesn't know how to do some basic operation. But does it need to earn reputation? I don't think so. See also the edit to my last comment.
    – Pekka
    Commented Apr 22, 2011 at 19:18
  • 14
    @Lance & @Pekka I get (very mildly) annoyed when someone asks a question I've already answered and instead of pasting a duplicate of my answer I flag the question as duplicate, then other people come along and upvote answers which, naturally, aren't as good as mine was, but they don't know that since they didn't see my answer to the original question. I could see the same argument for wikifying duplicates, but I also see the same counterargument. Either way someone loses.
    – Isaac Truett
    Commented Apr 22, 2011 at 19:19
  • 3
    @Isaac yeah, all true. However, with duplicates, the counter-argument is stronger IMO: It's much, much more difficult and time-consuming to recognize a duplicate. I tend to leave that be, CW'ization would often be terribly unfair. But reference questions are easy to tell if you have a bit of knowledge.
    – Pekka
    Commented Apr 22, 2011 at 19:20
  • 4
    I have to weigh in with Lance here. General reference means something different to quite a few people. Technically speaking 90% of questions can probably be answered by RTFM, but that ignores the whole point of SE which is to take linear search and turn it into a hash table. And on the other hand, what does it hurt to have the answers to "obvious" questions available on SE?
    – Catskul
    Commented Aug 5, 2011 at 5:13
  • 2
    @Catskul re "what does it hurt" - the hurt is that those questions duplicate information that is directly available in reference manuals. They are always in danger of being outdated, or incomplete. It doesn't make sense. The 90% of questions that may technically be RTFM questions are not what this proposal is about. It is only about questions that are completely answered by a manual link. I'm not against giving the asker an answer, mind - it's just the long-term storage in the question base, their popping up in search results etc. that I think is counter-productive.
    – Pekka
    Commented Aug 5, 2011 at 9:57