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The 2013 SXSE question Resources and references on the topic of space exploration was kindly migrated to meta, and recognizing the value of a central source, 5 answers were posted with a really nice cross-section of resources listed. This is one of those rare exceptions to "list" questions where the benefits to the whole community were recognized and an exception made.

Had I not caught the recent question How would one go about learning rocket science? [on hold] with closing imminent (4 close votes after only 3 hours) it's possible the user would never have known about the helpful collection.

There's several options, including moving to meta then marking as duplicate, but the problem is (probably) that the first four close-voters had never seen the question in meta and all of it's helpful goodies.

I'm sure if one of them knew about it, something better and more helpful would have happened than a solitary You did something wrong and a complementary down vote, without even a link to help or take the tour, much less a "welcome to SE".

Question: Are there some ways to raise awareness of helpful collections of resources? At least the one "Resources and references..." that I've linked to above?

(there's also this one for example with 10 answers)

As an aside, there are indeed plenty of well received questions here and in other SE sites that ask for resources. Of course SE can be and is used to ask for resources. The issue is with the breadth of the question and unlimited number of possible answers with the general wording. At the minimum, when leaving the you've done something wrong and the complementary down vote, we should at least make an effort to explain correctly how to improve this or future questions.

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Perhaps we should add a note about it and a link to it from the Tour? Something like:

Don't ask about...

  • Anything not directly related to space exploration
  • Questions that are primarily opinion-based
  • Questions with too many possible answers or that would require an extremely long answer
  • The study of exosolar objects, except as they relate to space travel
  • Physical sciences, such as geology, astronomy, cosmology, meteorology, except as they relate to spacecraft and space exploration

Are you looking for reference materials or other lists of resources? Check out these resources on our meta site:

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  • $\begingroup$ Oh that looks excellent, I thought you'd pasted a screenshot from an existing page. This is an excellent idea. $\endgroup$
    – uhoh
    Commented Mar 26, 2018 at 16:32
  • $\begingroup$ No longer a "perhaps", that's fast work! $\endgroup$
    – uhoh
    Commented Mar 26, 2018 at 20:21
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Missed this too. Yes according to the rules (too broad/list question) the resources and references question should not be on the main site, but for all practical purposes it should. Moving it seems like a bad idea. I do not have an objection if it stays on main, especially if it is a community wiki and if a remark is added to the question text.

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  • $\begingroup$ Main site questions should no longer be made community wiki. I think it is better to have the resource on meta. It has the pleasant side effect of making new users aware of meta. $\endgroup$
    – called2voyage Mod
    Commented Mar 26, 2018 at 16:19
  • $\begingroup$ @called2voyage Can you link me to resources for Main site questions should no longer be made community wiki? Not that I object, but I would like to see the rationale/consensus. (And the links will also show it the is a 'Space' or network wide thing). $\endgroup$
    – user10509
    Commented Mar 26, 2018 at 18:32
  • $\begingroup$ Direct communication from the CM team: "Basically, we no longer use wiki as a broad rep-denial mechanism or when a question might become a list. [We could have removed] Community Wiki on SE a long time ago, but it still has a really, really narrow use case when an answer is being used as a broad, collaborative repository that is constantly being updated by a lot of users." I can't link to it since it was a private message. $\endgroup$
    – called2voyage Mod
    Commented Mar 26, 2018 at 18:56
  • $\begingroup$ Note: It says using community wiki for answer repositories is ok, but not questions. $\endgroup$
    – called2voyage Mod
    Commented Mar 26, 2018 at 18:57
  • $\begingroup$ Forgot to quote the bit with the rationale: "Wiki has a long history of continued use where the use case is no longer needed... to the point where the entire feature has been largely deprecated. Since the concept of Community Wiki was created, we've added a lot of features that have almost completely negated the need for it at all" Basically, the feature changes are kind of orthogonal to the use of community wiki in this case, but the rationale goes on to say that questions that need to be wikified probably don't belong in the SE model. $\endgroup$
    – called2voyage Mod
    Commented Mar 26, 2018 at 19:16
  • $\begingroup$ Anyhow, storing these questions in meta is a way of recognizing that the resource is valuable to this community but doesn't really fit the format of the main site. $\endgroup$
    – called2voyage Mod
    Commented Mar 26, 2018 at 19:17

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