A need(?)

This recent post on MSO says "Collections and learning pathways – does the concept of collectively-curated public lists interest you, why, and how might management of it work?" The idea of this has interested me in the past year- as something not limited to collectives. I get the feeling that a very large part of the people coming to SO are newbies. I think people like that need help with picking up foundational information in an organized/orderly way, for some topic or subject. Sometimes I see the sorts of questions where our guidance says "you could write a whole book about this. close.", and wondered about the possibility and value of giving some more help than just closing (sometimes I see this accompanied by a comment like- "you should go study this at school, or read a book").

I've got a draft of a post seeking community thoughts about whether we think there's a need out there for that, and whether we're a good fit to help. Ex. could a subset of the kinds of questions we close as needing more focus instead be answered by breaking down the question and linking to other Q&A that either provide useful information in the form and level of granularity we're used to, or that further break down a sub-question? I'm sort of thinking "learning pathway", but maybe more like "(optionally-)depth-first learning tree". To some degree, some tag wikis try to do the first level of that, but I'm interested in potential value from going further with that idea. In areas where I'm a newbie myself, I often don't know how to break down my question because I don't know what I don't know.

What we are

This is where what we are and what we have comes in. We have:

• Invested, hard-working, smart volunteers willing to lend strangers on the internet a hand and build a useful, lasting resource.
• A platform supporting, curation and user-ranking of content
  • a platform which- theoretically- could support this idea with little change to mechanisms. Just use answer posts, and people can write their own answers if they don't agree with other ones, or make community wikis, and people can vote on them. (In reality, I expect it would be messier than that when it comes to at which point something should be broken into a separate Q&A, but I don't feel like that's a showstopper, and more like something to workshop on meta)
• A focused, high-level goal, methodology

Just musing. I haven't gotten to finishing that draft discussion post. I know it could be a controversial idea. Please be gentle.

A need(?)

This recent post on MSO says "Collections and learning pathways – does the concept of collectively-curated public lists interest you, why, and how might management of it work?" The idea of this has interested me in the past year- as something not limited to collectives. I get the feeling that a very large part of the people coming to SO are newbies. I think people like that need help with picking up foundational information in an organized/orderly way, for some topic or subject. Sometimes I see the sorts of questions where our guidance says "you could write a whole book about this. close.", and wondered about the possibility and value of giving some more help than just closing (sometimes I see this accompanied by a comment like- "you should go study this at school, or read a book").

I've got a draft of a post seeking community thoughts about whether we think there's a need out there for that, and whether we're a good fit to help. Ex. could a subset of the kinds of questions we close as needing more focus instead be answered by breaking down the question and linking to other Q&A that either provide useful information in the form and level of granularity we're used to, or that further break down a sub-question? I'm sort of thinking "learning pathway", but maybe more like "learning trees". To some degree, some tag wikis try to do the first level of that, but I'm interested in potential value from going further with that idea. In areas where I'm a newbie myself, I often don't know how to break down my question because I don't know what I don't know.

What we are

This is where what we are and what we have comes in. We have:

• Invested, hard-working, smart volunteers willing to lend strangers on the internet a hand and build a useful, lasting resource.
• A platform supporting, curation and user-ranking of content
  • a platform which- theoretically- could support this idea with little change to mechanisms. Just use answer posts, and people can write their own answers if they don't agree with other ones, or make community wikis, and people can vote on them. (In reality, I expect it would be messier than that when it comes to at which point something should be broken into a separate Q&A, but I don't feel like that's a showstopper, and more like something to workshop on meta)
• A focused, high-level goal, methodology

Just musing. I haven't gotten to finishing that draft discussion post. I know it could be a controversial idea. Please be gentle.

This recent post on MSO says "Collections and learning pathways – does the concept of collectively-curated public lists interest you, why, and how might management of it work?" The idea of this has interested me in the past year- as something not limited to collectives. I get the feeling that a very large part of the people coming to SO are newbies. I think people like that need help with picking up foundational information in an organized/orderly way, for some topic or subject. Sometimes I see the sorts of questions where our guidance says "you could write a whole book about this. close.", and wondered about the possibility and value of giving some more help than just closing (sometimes I see this accompanied by a comment like- "you should go study this at school, or read a book").

I've got a draft of a post seeking community thoughts about whether we think there's a need out there for that, and whether we're a good fit to help. Ex. could a subset of the kinds of questions we close as needing more focus instead be answered by breaking down the question and linking to other Q&A that either provide useful information in the form and level of granularity we're used to, or that further break down a sub-question? I'm sort of thinking "learning pathway", but maybe more like "(optionally-)depth-first learning tree". To some degree, some tag wikis try to do the first level of that, but I'm interested in potential value from going further with that idea. In areas where I'm a newbie myself, I often don't know how to break down my question because I don't know what I don't know.

Just musing. I haven't gotten to finishing that draft discussion post. I know it could be a controversial idea. Please be gentle.

A need(?)

This recent post on MSO says "Collections and learning pathways – does the concept of collectively-curated public lists interest you, why, and how might management of it work?" The idea of this has interested me in the past year- as something not limited to collectives. I get the feeling that a very large part of the people coming to SO are newbies. I think people like that need help with picking up foundational information in an organized/orderly way, for some topic or subject. Sometimes I see the sorts of questions where our guidance says "you could write a whole book about this. close.", and wondered about the possibility and value of giving some more help than just closing (sometimes I see this accompanied by a comment like- "you should go study this at school, or read a book").

I've got a draft of a post seeking community thoughts about whether we think there's a need out there for that, and whether we're a good fit to help. Ex. could a subset of the kinds of questions we close as needing more focus instead be answered by breaking down the question and linking to other Q&A that either provide useful information in the form and level of granularity we're used to, or that further break down a sub-question? I'm sort of thinking "learning pathway", but maybe more like "(optionally-)depth-first learning tree". To some degree, some tag wikis try to do the first level of that, but I'm interested in potential value from going further with that idea. In areas where I'm a newbie myself, I often don't know how to break down my question because I don't know what I don't know.

What we are

This is where what we are and what we have comes in. We have:

• Invested, hard-working, smart volunteers willing to lend strangers on the internet a hand and build a useful, lasting resource.
• A platform supporting, curation and user-ranking of content
  • a platform which- theoretically- could support this idea with little change to mechanisms. Just use answer posts, and people can write their own answers if they don't agree with other ones, or make community wikis, and people can vote on them. (In reality, I expect it would be messier than that when it comes to at which point something should be broken into a separate Q&A, but I don't feel like that's a showstopper, and more like something to workshop on meta)
• A focused, high-level goal, methodology

Just musing. I haven't gotten to finishing that draft discussion post. I know it could be a controversial idea. Please be gentle.