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ccatron's avatar

Would it be helpful to provide a "commonly used resources" list for Fluther?

Asked by ccatron (2073points) July 10th, 2008

For instance, a lot of questions come through that can be answered with a quick search in Wikipedia. I’m sure there are some people that don’t know about wikipedia or they forget about looking there. If a list of these kinds of sites were provided in a sidebar, would that take away from Fluther or help? Even if people don’t use the resources before asking a question or they don’t find anything, another Flutherer might find something using the resources.

some examples could be
http://www.wikipedia.org (for information about people, places and things)
http://www.instructables.com (how to make stuff)
http://www.doityourself.com/ (how to’s)
http://www.ehow.com (more how to’s)
http://www.wikihow.com (more)
http://www.google.com (general searching)
http://www.iphoneatlas.com/ (or some other iphone help site)

I’m not sure if it would help or hurt the community. Just throwing it out there to see what everyone thinks.

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5 Answers

nikipedia's avatar

Sure, I think it would be helpful—as long as people avoid answering questions with “read the commonly used resources links, dumbass!!!!!!” I imagine sometimes people post questions that have been answered elsewhere on the internet because they’re looking for more perspectives/ideas or just some discussion.

jonno's avatar

I think when someone tries to post a question, before the question is posted, it should show them a list of previous Fluther questions (which contain similar words to the one they are trying to submit), and ask the user to make sure their question has not already been asked in the list. It would also show them something like the “commonly used resources” list that you have suggested (but I think maybe a few less websites).

This would hopefully prevent too many duplicate questions and easy-to-find/obvious questions.

marinelife's avatar

Anyone who would use a resource list, would not need the resource list. Also, I personally don’t like to encourage the use of wikipedia as a primary source.

gailcalled's avatar

Some people barely read the question and often repeat answers that have already repeated an earlier one. Surely you can’t expect these people to pay more attention?

I would suggest that when people write large blocks of text, no matter how fascinating, that they use breaks. I tend to skip the long gray masses, that might well be interesting, if there are no spaces occasionally.

scamp's avatar

I think it’s a great idea. I am bookmarking this thread to save the links you have posted. The idea to have this available is a good one. We could ‘gently’ encourage askers to check these sources. Many will probably not take the hint, but at least it’s there for those who would.

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