It can be difficult to navigate the magnitude of answers available on certain types of posts. These posts usually span multiple pages and by definition hide a lot of information.   While reading all the answers is a great way to understand the issues, there are posts with 5+ pages of answers. There is no way that most users have read all the answers (Some? Maybe), but most people want to be more efficient when going through these types of posts.   You don't read a scientific paper first. You read the abstract continue from there. What I am suggesting is an "abstract" for these confusing, and/or controversial posts.  From the last 2 months, these are the posts that come to mind that would benefit from an "abstract" of some kind       Is there a better way to navigate through all the answers and confusing parts of the post in a way that will allow others to understand the post and answers more clearly?    For clarity, this would not apply for your everyday Meta posts. This is only for those posts that produce multiple pages of answers. That heavily reduces which posts this would apply to.
68874
on StackOverflow, I asked a . There are many good answers but I can not accept just one of it. I would prefer to create my own answer where I summarize all answers. Is that allowed?
123551
Some months back I got into a situation where a paper with information that I considered important to prove a point was in a language I cannot understand. Since it was important but not crucial, I ended up not using the paper. Except for its abstract, which was in English, the entire paper was in this other language. It had graphs and images that I could understand without knowing the language.  At the time, I was tempted to use Google Translate in order to get the general idea of the paper  (in more detail than what is given in the abstract), while not necessarily trusting on the specific information that the translation gave me (). Since this would still leave me with some measure of uncertainty — there was no way for me to be sure exactly what it was saying — I thought it better to just let the paper go.  But say that in a future situation I find a crucial paper in a language I don't understand: if I use Google Translate, using the paper in a situation that does not require specific information but only it's general gist, would citing it be ethically acceptable?  (It's almost the same situation as , but I'm not concerned with translating the entire paper, for this would take time/resources that I simply don't have access to.)
1774
Stuff like polls, recommendations based on subjective constraints, puzzles, webcomics etc. do not belong on the serious main SE sites, where professionals should be considered at work and having just a few spare minutes ("code's compiling") to answer questions, so they should not be distracted by such things. However, I'd also like to have a home for these things still using the SE engine. For the reason I mentioned before, this needs to be a separate place though. Let's call it four.[sitename-here].com.
54423
The answer list only displays first 30 answers, for questions with lots of answers - no pagination or lazy-loading once you reach the bottom, to view the other answers.  Personally counted every answer twice.
74303
I have looked at the various help pages but I couldn't find a clear guideline for the following issue: often enough someone will ask in the same post (i.e. in the same SE-question) a whole bunch of questions (in the plain English sense of the word), which while may be about the same topic are nevertheless sufficiently distinct that each may require several paragraphs of text to answer adequately.   I can see an upside for leaving related questions grouped together from the asker's perspective: "there's a thread (on SE) answering all my questions about topic T!" On the other hand, from the perspective of organizing questions by having a clear heading/title for each (actual) question and so forth, i.e. from the perspective of SE being a fairly structured database of Q&amp;As instead of being a more like a collection of forum threads "I'm confused about topic T", the omnibus question-list approach seems clearly sub-optimal.  The omnibus approach also makes the issue of accepting answers (and perhaps reviewing such actions) difficult: if two different users give replies to different parts/sub-sets of the question-list, which one is the most adequate one? Even upvoting all partial answers seems iffy because it actually penalizes the user(s) who provides(s) the most complete answer to the question-list: since a user can only give at most one upvote to another user's answer, if user X provides answers to A &amp; B in the same SE-answer, he can only get at most one upvote from user Y, whereas if these were two different SE-answers, he could get two upvotes from user Y.  So, given the above problems, which I think are real enough, is there anything in the SE system addressing list-of-questions question splitting?
86203
I often find it intimidating to try and figure out where my question fits.   And will often end up posting in the wrong spot. Then I will get sent links to meta sites with large amounts of text, explaining why my question does not live there. These meta sites do great work in setting out clear rules, but there is a large amount of information to process.  I fully support the need to maintain the quality of these sites. But I find the user experience is a little lacking.   Am I just going about this the wrong way?
8373
in questions, answers, and comments. Can we get something like this going on Stack Overflow?  I think it’d be appropriate as I at least pretty often want to write something like n^2 and would benefit greatly from prettier markup.
8815
As a result of  myself, the need arose to track other Stack Overflow-based research. The following is an attempt to list the academic papers mentioning Stack Overflow/Exchange or using Stack Exchange data. This also includes the works mentioned in  that started the trend, as well as two other questions on meta, , and . If you know of papers that are not listed, please edit the answer directly. I realised it might be useful to have all the BibTeX entries in a single file, so I started .
18885
I am posting this question just to get a better understanding of the questions that can be asked on Stack Overflow.  I find that  can several answers based on users opinion and cause a discussion.  Why is this a good question when several other requests for books and tutorials are not acceptable?
89010
On Software Engineering I've been adding a message along these lines to old(ish) questions that have enough answers to be CW if they start getting new answers.     Please read all of the existing answers before posting yours. The question is relatively old and has a reasonable number of answers already. There is a good chance that your answer has already been posted.   I know most people don't read dialogs and just click "OK" to get through them, but if we can stop a few people adding to such questions then it's got to be good right?  The age of the question and the number of existing answers required that trigger this message can be configurable.
54738
My feed shows questions from all SE sites, most of which are irrelevant to me.  I'm interested in physics, math, and programming, topics I find served well by the SE model.  There are many SE communities I have no interest in and even get annoyed when I see the kinds of questions and answers posted (ie, opinion based answers that are passed off as truths).    It would be much better if I could manually add each site I'd like to see questions from.
57833
There is a certain amount of questions that are absolutely trivial in nature: How to format a date, how to concatenate a string, et cetera. Questions that could be solved by taking a look into the manual.  Random examples from the tags I frequent:                What those OPs need is a link to the right manual, which we should give them. But the question serves no purpose. They don't even have a use by being searchable,  because any sane search query would lead to the actual manual as the first hit.  Jeff discusses the possibility of introducing a new close reason for this over at  According to Robert's suggestion there, it could go like this:     general reference: this question is too basic; the answer is indexed in any number of general internet reference sources designed specifically to find that type of information.   Please please implement this.  Add a field (like the "enter duplicate ID here" popup) for users to suggest the correct manual link:    The suggested links would then be shown in a block in the top section of the question, like duplicate links.   Also, the amount of reputation earnable from these trivial questions is appalling. I'm sure a great portion of most high-rep users' points (including mine) is from answering "what was that function for replacing a string again?" type questions. This dilutes the value of reputation as a measure of true expertise a great deal.  I would suggest that answers to questions that get closed as "general reference" are made community wiki retroactively, taking away any reputation earned.
114218
Today I came across an OBVIOUSLY good answer in /review. It had 7 upvotes, contained lists, paragraphs of explanation, and well-applied sample code. It was also moderately long. How does a question like this get flagged for review? I don't really know how the algorithm works.   If this is low-quality then I feel bad about all of my answers.  Here's a  if you care to see it in context. It's not really a huge problem (as Bart's comment emphasizes), but this seems like an extreme outlier in every measurable aspect.
117064
When posting a question with some code (or generally any question with more detailed description and some explaining) you have to do lots of scrolling when reviewing the changes. While there is huge amount of empty space on both sides. So many people have wide screens these days, I think they might appreciate the question preview instead of that empty space so there would be way less scrolling.  Also note this suggestion does not say "screw those with lower res. screens".
18297
When a question is open, it would be nice to see that there are X people (or preferrably a list of the X people) who are in the process of writing an answer.  For simple questions, usually once I'm about to hit the "post your answer question" I get the "there are 3 new answers, click here to load them" nag.
52528
“If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself." - Einstein     A properly worded question asking for a generalized summary of a broad concept, in my opinion, is a valuable question.  However, not all users here seem to share this opinion:      "Why is the sky blue?"    -OP     "Go do some research first and ask a more specific question newb."    -Angry Commenter    "Why is the sky blue?" is an exaggeration, and over-simplification of the scenario, and would be unacceptable if the subject were more broad!  However, consider:     "What is Evolution?"   VS     "What is a general summarization of the concept of Evolution?"   While the first question is asking for the meaning of Evolution, which is completely unanswerable in this format, the second one asks for the general summary of the concept, which requires only a short paragraph.   In this way, SE can offer a valuable summary of a very large concept in a simple way, allowing people to use that information and decide whether or not they wish to spend more time studying the topic.     What do you think?  Is a question that specifically asks for a summary of a broad topic a good fit for and valuable to Stack Exchange?
36470
UPDATE: This is now live on all Stack Exchange sites. You can access it at /help or by clicking the "help" link in the top nav or footer of any page.   We can all agree that Stack Exchange is a complicated beast that takes a while to understand. New users can be overwhelmed and confused by all of the rules, where to find them, and how to abide by them. Even though many established users leave comments linking to helpful resources, or answer questions posted to metas, it's a scattershot way to help users learn our rules and answer their questions.  And so, we're introducing a new Help Center, which you can now see here on MSO: .  Here's what we're hoping to achieve:   Consolidate important information that is currently scattered throughout a great many resources: MSO and child metas'  lists, each site's official FAQ page, blog posts, and miscellaneous other resources like our  pages and  /  guides. Any rules or explanations of basic site mechanics should be easily accessible in one place. Allow easy linking and easy navigation. Each topic is separated out onto its own page, with a unique URL to allow pointed linking to that page. Each article page also has sidebar navigation that shows other topics in the same category, as well as a list of other categories, for the rare user who is motivated to read more. Use comprehensible language that non-power users will be able to understand. A lot of our guidance, written by the community and by Stack Exchange itself, uses jargon that can be unclear to users learning our system for the first time. We want to make sure terminology is sufficiently explained and use plain language wherever possible.   This Help Center will (once we roll it out to all sites) replace the current FAQ pages. Each site will continue to have its own  tag on meta, but any policy that is essential to the functioning of the community will be rolled into the appropriate section of the new Help Center.  What's broken, and what are we missing?  We're already planning to add more features and articles to the Help Center in the coming weeks, but we wanted to show you all the core of it and get your feedback. There are additional articles that we plan to include here (especially in the "Reputation &amp; Privileges" category), but the articles currently included should cover everything that exists in the current FAQ and old /help page /contact page (which will be redesigned when the new Help Center is live everywhere).  This is live only on MSO right now. We want to get your opinions about the Help Center in general, fix any bugs or typos you might find, and add any crucial information that's missing. Once we've addressed all those things, the new Help Center will roll out network-wide.   A couple of implementation notes:   We will be adding a "search" feature to the /help landing page that will make it easier for users with a specific problem to find the relevant article(s). Site moderators will be able to edit the  page to include lists of what is on- and off-topic for each site, just as they can currently edit the "What can I ask here?" part of the current FAQ. You may notice that some article titles are preceded by a round bullet. The bullet is temporary while Jin designs an icon, but those articles are "featured" articles; they are meant to draw attention to the most important site policies or most frequently encountered issues. Fixed   So there you have it. A new, consolidated, Help Center to provide a single resource for users looking to understand how our network works.  We're still making some small changes to this feature. Please continue to post here on meta if you encounter any bugs / typos / broken links. If you want to suggest a new page, have an issue specific to one site, or have another major change, you can start a new meta post and tag it .