I support this idea. I run into the need for it all the time.
I find a solid pattern of new world builders that come here asking a question which is not a good fit for the site, but where they could easily have answered the question on their own if they knew just a little more. For example, this happens in the domain of Time Travel all the time. Many novice world builders come with the assumption that there is one correct form of time travel, and ask some question about killing a grandfather. The whole beauty of time travel is that there are myriad solutions to that problem, and the author gets to choose which ones they want. This rapidly leads to the question being closed as too story based or unclear.
Now these questions should be closed. They don't fit the site. But having your question closed by 5 people in 3 minutes as "not good enough" is a really daunting experience. Sure, one of us might take the time to write a comment directing them to the sandbox, but we've already announced that we're not willing to answer their question.
Picture a different story. Imagine if there were a Community-Wiki question on Time Travel, with the most common gotchas all listed. There could be an answer recommending people read up on Novikov's Consistency Principle. For those who are seeking a broader answer, an answer summarizing the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's article on Causality may be able to address the concept of free will and time travel. We might have an answer which links to a Universe Factory article containing advice on how to pick your time travel methodology.
Now, the same question comes in. It is closed, as it should be. But now it can be closed as a duplicate of this Community-Wiki question, with comments saying, "You may be able to answer this question yourself, after reading this answer" or "If you read this answer, you'll realize that there's a great WorldBuilding question just around the corner. You just need to learn a little more first."
Now, instead of giving them the cold shoulder, we can point them towards the resources we believe will help them in their WorldBuilding efforts, as I feel it should be.
These overarching questions would make for poor non-Community-wiki questions. Given that their explicit intent is to help answer many many worldbuilding questions, they will almost certainly be too broad to stand on their own. They aren't questions. They are collections of resources for new WorldBuilders. We really need something broader than a proper question, and a community-wiki question fits that bill.
Ideally, I don't want to see a bunch of new good questions closed as duplicates of the community wiki. The purpose would not be to close new questions. It would be to provide a better way to close the questions which needed to be closed anyway in a way that also helps the poor world builder out.
Topics I can see fitting this pattern:
- Time Travel
- Building a Magic system (always too story based, but the general principles are timeless)
- War (Few truly grasp what war is, so the questions are often off the mark)
- Economics and Trade
- AI and consciousness (what can real AIs do, and what happens when you try to bring the 'c' word into the discussion)
Edit: I'm going to keep a running-log of sorts of new questions that I think are perfect examples of this issue, as I see them. I won't catalogue old questions, so this shows an ongoing trend of questions that could use these CWs:
