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For the reasons listed here, overview questions need to be highly focused. In particular, they need to be more focused than if you asking about a single denomination.

For example, take the question "What should or shouldn't people do on the Sabbath?" While this would be on-topic if talking about a specific denomination, it would likely be problematic as an overview question.

In particular, it would be hard to answer in depth for each denomination what the answer is, since for overview questions, all the denominations need to be put into a single answer (see Can part of a question be answered for overview questions?). This obviously precludes going into detail for each denomination.

What I propose for questions like this is a "list of questions" question.

They would similarly to wikipedia list articles. Instead of asking "What should or shouldn't people do on the Sabbath?", you would ask "What questions are there about "What should or shouldn't people do on the Sabbath?" from the point of view of different denominations?" Then, there would be a single community wiki answer, listing questions from this site answering that question. Since all the links are in one answer, voting doesn't become a "popularity contest".

Each of these questions can then go in depth about the beliefs of the denomination in question. Then some starting at the "list" question, can click the links, and see the views of the different denominations.

This can serve to organize questions that already exist in a way that tags can't (since we obviously can't make a tag for each overview question).

If you all think its a good idea, I can make a trial question of this form.

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I think tags are a more effective taxonomy than meta questions like that ever would be. At the end of the day it would just be trying to cram something into the format that it wasn't designed to. This is what tags and search were designed to handle, and for ever more closely related questions cross-linking them is also useful. All these things fit into the normal navigation of the site as it was designed as opposed to non-question-questions that would introduce a chaos factor.

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  • Cross linking wouldn't work very well since there would be no central node. And tags/search don't tell if you a post has "sister" questions, only links do that. An additional benefit of the "list of questions" question is that inspires a bunch of similar questions to be asked.
    – PyRulez
    Feb 14, 2018 at 16:46
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    @PyRulez The "related" box next to questions often does a serviceable job of listing related questions, automatically. Feb 14, 2018 at 21:25
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I a similar idea back a while ago. Anybody interested in doing a Catechism? As a mod now, I don't think it's tenable because I see what new users and passerbys do and I think ever question needs to be answerable by anybody in some way and we can't just have pet questions.

We can, however, have pet questions on meta - it wouldn't look good if they weren't maintained though... So it think it might be appropriate here, but it wouldn't solve the problem of overview questions (the problem being overview questions with single viewpoint answers coming in later because the main overview answer missed that viewpoint)

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  • "So it think it might be appropriate here, but it wouldn't solve the problem of overview questions (the problem being overview questions with single viewpoint answers coming in later because the main overview answer missed that viewpoint)" Well, technically it would bel all single viewpoint answers. That would sort of be the point, since you can more depth with single viewpoint answers.
    – PyRulez
    Feb 14, 2018 at 16:47
  • @pyrules, Oh yeah, if we oughtright ban overview questions, that's true
    – Peter Turner Mod
    Feb 14, 2018 at 18:44

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