This question was proposed, possibly to turn into a CW. In its current form, I don't think it is too well put-forth. What can we as a community do to help it out? Or, do we want to discourage this type of question?
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Agreed - too broad in current format, but useful - it just needs a much tighter focus and to be phrased differently. Issue 1) 'Freelance Websites' - this could be narrowed to to include a type of 'Freelance Website' (i.e. Freelance Job Boards); Issue 2) 'Exhaustive list' - that's endless. Once the focus is tightened as suggested above, the next improvement to the question could be to ask, instead, 'What are the top 10 most used job boards for 'Freelance Web Designers;' It then becomes much more focused, more useful, and possible to provide more tightly defined answers.– NivF007Commented Apr 12, 2014 at 0:37
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It may seem daunting to look around sometimes and not see many questions on our site. Building a great site and community takes time and patience, and it's important we as a community continue to stay focused on making Freelancing Stack Exchange become the place to find answers from the experts, from the people who have seen the good and the bad sides of freelancing and can provide professional answers, explanations, and guidance.
A question asking nothing more than to provide an exhaustive list of freelancing websites is a classic, textbook example of what we as a community don't want our site to become, and our front page has a couple other examples in the last few days that are of similar caliber although not quite this extreme.
From the Help Center's What types of questions should I avoid asking?:
To prevent your question from being flagged and possibly removed, avoid asking subjective questions where …
- every answer is equally valid: “What’s your favorite ______?”
- your answer is provided along with the question, and you expect more answers: “I use ______ for ______, what do you use?”
- there is no actual problem to be solved: “I’m curious if other people feel like I do.”
- you are asking an open-ended, hypothetical question: “What if ______ happened?”
- your question is just a rant in disguise: “______ sucks, am I right?”
What's more, one only need do a few Google searches to see that there are countless examples of these compilations elsewhere on the Internet. We don't need to replicate something that can already be easily found in other places.
Instead, let's stay focused on real questions that have answers:
In Good Subjective, Bad Subjective, we made a pretty solid first stab at defining a constructive subjective question, one that I’ve been happy with so far.
Constructive subjective questions:
- inspire answers that explain “why” and “how”.
- tend to have long, not short, answers.
- have a constructive, fair, and impartial tone.
- invite sharing experiences over opinions.
- insist that opinion be backed up with facts and references.
- are more than just mindless social fun.
The above list is what's known as the six guidelines to a good subjective question, and these guidelines help focus on building more attractive, great content since they encourage answerers to think more deeply about what they're writing. If you as a Freelancing SE community member see questions that don't meet these guidelines, here's what you can do:
- If you have less that 500 reputation, please flag the post for moderator attention.
- If you have at least 500 reputation, use your close/reopen vote privileges to help put the question on hold.
If we put a question on hold, we'll all take a deeper look to see if we can edit and improve it. If editable, some closed posts are good candidates to be reopened. In many cases, I've seen such questions become some of the best questions on a site which help future visitors for years to come.
