"What is a pipeline?" and some other are not good fit for this site

Question

Recently some questions were posted on Sitecore StackExchange.

such as:
1. What is pipeline?
2. What is a template?
3. What is a Sitecore Item?
4. What is the difference between a Layout, Sublayout, and Rendering?

Which are not good for this site, because they look broad and also somewhat interview question.

If such questions are allowed then there would hundreds of such questions based-on each tags that we have on Sitecore StackExchange site.

I would propose to close such broad questions and if require refine the Help/FAQ.

Answer 1

In my opinion we should not try to write documentation on the Sitecore StackExchange site. As Mark asked here, if the documentation feature would be present that information would find a very good place there. But for now, I can only see people asking questions that they might think are valuable for newbies but I'm not even sure they are.. Even if they know that stuff, they still don't touch my site. They do need proper training. And if they have questions after the training, they could come here. But not to find out what an item is ;)

Answer 2

This has been a pretty interesting conversation on Slack regarding this. There is a defined reason why we thought about going in this direction. Perhaps the use of the tag as defined was not the best suited.

To explain a little further, Cassidy and I spent a little time looking at the salesforce.stackexchange.com site last night. They started kind of like our site did. Grassroots by the community, adopted by the Salesforce corporate, and then turned into a pretty large Q&A site that attracts users of all levels. Marketers, Users, beginner dev, advanced devs.. It spans the gambit.

This fell in line with a thought going through my head of, how do we entice marketers, users, etc to use the site as well. The types of questions are very hard, some very specific, mostly all technical. What happens it the normal marketer comes in? Would they be intimidated by such highlevel questions and decide not to ask? Would the community be so elite (no offense intended here, just making an example) that they would immediately VTC easy topics.

This got me wondering what would happen. So this is a beta. And I tossed 4 softball questions out into the open. Two of them have actually had really good responses thus far. This is a Public Beta, thought process was, let's try it out and see how the community reacts.

But our reasoning didn't stop there.

We're looking ahead to the Documentation feature of Stack Exchange and realizing there's a place for a large number of our questions, including these easy ones. Once the Documentation feature is open, we would migrate these types of questions to the Documentation feature of Stack Exchange for this site.

So, after some good conversation, we changed the tags to documentation on those questions to highlight the need to move them once the Documentation feature is available to us.

Thanks for starting this meta topic though. I invite others to chime in.

Answer 3

As Pete points out; there is some debate behind this.

We're basically soliciting community input on this whole thing - and we realise it is not without controversy.

I suggest you "Vote to close" on the questions you feel should be closed. If enough (not many, 5 votes needed) people in the community agree with you, they will go away.

But do consider Pete's point, in what we're trying to test out here.