What should our requirements on various "recommend me something" questions be?

Question

See also Do we want resource recommendation questions?, Are software recommendation questions on topic? and to a lesser extent When are software-recommendation questions on topic?.

As pointed out elsewhere, we already have tags that are meant to be about various "recommend me something" questions.

Several other sites have specific standards for what they consider to be acceptable recommendation questions. See for example those of Physics and Software Recommendations.

Given that there is a fair consensus for us accepting questions on the form "please recommend me an X to do Y" (where X so far has primarily been software), we should have a set of standards for what makes such a question acceptable, and ideally what makes for a good answer to such a question. As far as I can tell, we have so far been rather non-specific in this regard.

What should those standards be?

Please post separate answers discussing the questions and the answers respectively, as the standards for each are likely to be different.

Answer 1

Questions should be focused on a particular aspect of the WB process

Avoid

• Can you recommend a book for worldbuilding?
• Which software should I get to build my world?

Prefer

• Which book do you recommend to help me getting the right relation between the main religion and the political power in an European Renaissance setting?
• Is there a software which can use fractal methods to help me draw the map of the continent?

Answer 2

Answers should be clear and specific, possibly adding link(s) to the resource in question

In case of a fixed resource (film, book, etc.) a small summary should be added, to give a chance to the OP to evaluate the relevance of the resource to her/him.

Avoid

• In a book by Shakespeare, you'll find an example.

  Problem: is the OP expected to read the complete work of Shakespeare to find an example which might not stretch more than a few pages?

Prefer

• In Romeo & Juliet by Shakespeare (amazon/Gutenberg), you'll find some material about the organisation of families in early Italian renaissance. For example, we learn that [...].