Why do we allow questions asking for guides?

Question

There's question type which has bugged me for a while: "Can someone provide me with a Guide for game X"? They seem to clearly fall under "Shopping Advice and Recommendation", and should therefore be closed as off-topic. However, we've never closed them and have several of them on the site. Some of these questions are just poorly worded, and others will need to be closed.

Drawing from these two wonderful answers by Miss Note, guide questions seem to fall under all the criteria listed as being an off-topic recommendation. She lists three criteria we can use to determine this:

1. A Shopping Recommendation: I think this one goes without saying. It's just a matter of opinion. "I suggest guide X because I like it."

2. An Itemized List: I also feel like this one goes without saying. All the questions will be is users listing guides they like.

3. Can the Question be Reworded into a Question about a Practical Problem: Some "Can I have a guide for X?" questions are just poorly worded, and are asking an actual problem. In these situations the question should just be edited to better represent the actual problem and question, because we should be doing this anyways.

   Questions which consist of nothing more than "CAn I have a guide of X?" should be closed as either off-topic or not a real question. Off-Topic should be used when there is no problem presented in the actual question body, because then it's just a shopping recommendation. not a real question should be used when either a really broad or vague problem is presented, since that's the what not a real question stands for.

So why is it we've allowed these questions up until now, and is it time we've changed this policy to begin closing questions which are just users asking for a guide for X?

Answer 1

Why do we allow them?

Because we're Gamers, not Pedants.

^{Okay, well those of us posting on Meta probably are pedants, but we should endeavour to restrain our pedantry insofar as it risks driving away users.}

The thing is, most of the time, when someone asks for a 'guide to x', they're really asking 'how do I get through x' or 'how do I use x well'. And if you look at most of the open questions with the word guide in them, you'll find that most of them have pretty good answers. Some of those answers link offsite, others are entirely self contained, but nearly none of them end up as 'lists of things' of the sort that we have trouble with. For instance, this answer is exceptional, and doesn't link offsite at all. Just because the asker used a word you're not happy with to describe his problem does not mean his question is invalid in any way, or even, I'd argue, in need of editing. Our users are pretty damned good at knowing how to properly respond to these questions for the most part.

Now, some requests for offsite resources really are recommendation questions of another flavor, and those are problem questions, and we're generally pretty good at closing those.

But, we really don't want to get into the business of closing and deleting questions over a failure to invoke the magic words (or not invoke the forbidden ones, as the case may be). In most cases, the intent of the asker is pretty clear, and if there are other issues with a question, as was the case with this mornings tempest in a teapot, then yes, by all means, clean it up to remove the word 'guide' if it annoys you so much. But to start a witch hunt over this seems exceedingly silly and shortsighted to me. The proper way to deal with these questions is to encourage and reward quality answers, while discouraging and downvoting low quality linkdumps and lists.

Answer 2

I present the following suggestion:

• Questions asking for a Guide of X which can't be reworded into an actual problem should be closed as off-topic.

• Questions asking for a Guide which can be reworded, but would then be too broad or vague, should be closed as not a real question until the asker refines their question.

• Questions which can be reworded into an actual problem, or just have titles misrepresenting their problem, should be reworded. Questions which are poorly worded, or just have bad titles, are supposed to be reworded anyways; this isn't anything special.

Answer 3

I never thought we allowed these in the first place. Any that are still open (no matter how numerous they may be) are likely oversights.

I don't see any reason to keep these open. We should be hosting quality content that helps gamers solve problems on our site, not merely serve as a repository of links to quality content elsewhere.

LessPopMoreFizz's answer to a separate question asking about why we closed a specific case of this is a good resource here. Guide questions are bad at being questions, although linking to a guide my be a viable addition to an answer. That decision, however, should be the answerer's, not the asker's.