We've got some questions on the site asking for a list of things, and the mods have been talking about ways to make these better without closing them. Questions asking for a list of resources, or a list of applicable techniques, or relevant books - these are hard to answer definitively.
Attempts at addressing this before:
Looking around, I found this here on meta.writers:
Are requests for resource lists OFF Topic?
Would it be considered OFF Topic to ask, not about the subject itself but for a resource list [...] of suggested books/sites/whatever for somebody to start his own research in a faster and better way?
The answer isn't clear, although it's leaning towards calling these off-topic.
But Stack Exchange has already addressed an analogous issue, in a way. Have a look at this blog post from 2010:
To continue to use an analogy, the gist of that blog post is that, if a user asks for the best camera for taking pictures of underwater coral (say), the best way to answer that is to explain how to identify the features needed (underwater, low-light cameras) and how to identify those features when doing research. Otherwise, recommendations for specific cameras will be out of date in short order and the asker of the question has learned little.
What we can do:
The gist is that we can address questions like this by answering them by explaining how to find what the user needs, not handing them a list of possible resources/digital cameras/car models/etc.
Let's use this meta post to list problematic list questions and discuss how we can answer them in a way that will satisfy the Stack Exchange way of doing things - answering questions canonically while making the internet a better, more informative place.
I'm making the answers Community Wiki so anyone can edit and suggest better ways to improve these questions. Please, everyone, feel free to keep posting questions and ideas, whether you're an active community member or not.
