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I don't see this as useful. Closed questions (apart from differently-worded duplicates) are on the path to deletion, so that they don't clutter the site. The tag wiki should directly reference the manual — if it referenced every RTFM question, you'd be including the whole manual in there.
– Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
Commented Apr 21, 2011 at 20:52
@Gil this is likely tangential and part of a separate issue, but I ran into an issue on how to ask a question. It was not due to lack of understanding how to ask a question on SE, rather a lack of the vocabulary to do so. Ie "concatenation"; someone may know the gist of what they're trying to do, and use every word in the definition, but if the closed attempts are all deleted the attempt to describe concatenation will continue to yield duplication. If the manual has a footnote with 2 or 3 bulleted, terse attempts there might be more search visibility.
– mfg
Commented Apr 21, 2011 at 22:49
If the question was asked due to a lack of vocabulary, then “How do I put two strings together, end to end?” “Use the [concatenate function](link).” is a perfectly valid Q&A on SO.
– Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
Commented Apr 21, 2011 at 22:54
@gil It wasn't about concatenation, but if the person doesn't yet know they're called string variables, but they're trying to combine words in Excel cells, they're bound to duplicate the other questions. That's what I'm hoping to head off.
– mfg
Commented Apr 21, 2011 at 23:10
That's just another example. If the asker's problem is essentially that they didn't know the word, then their question is not a duplicate of someone else's who used completely different words. If that's all you'd have on your “index of closed questions”, then it would be made of questions that should not have been closed!
– Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
Commented Apr 21, 2011 at 23:14

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