How could we make it easier to find common questions and duplicate targets?

Question

Like any SE site, we have typical recurring questions ("What's a secure password pattern?", "What can my employer see if I use HTTPS?", etc.). But sometimes it's hard to discover the right duplicate target. Often that's because the question is phrased around a very specific scenario, it has a non-obvious title, or the keywords are difficult to search for.

How other sites address the problem:

• SU has established a community-faq tag for canonical/frequent questions.

• Other sites maintain lists as community wikis on meta. E.g., math.SE has List of Generalizations of Common Questions and chemistry.SE has The Giant List of Duplicates.

Would something like that be appropriate for us? Other suggestions? Not a problem at all?

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Personally, I think we should experiment with a list on meta, with an emphasis on generalizations. E.g., I think most XSS categories have already been asked about. So, when seeing an XSS question that sounds familiar, I'd browse the XSS category of the list to see if we already have a generalized version of it.

A few examples of generalizations to cover would be:

• How do I deal with a compromised server?

• Can my employer see what I do on the internet when I am connected to the company network?

• How can I reliably erase all information on a hard drive?

• How to determine what type of encoding/encryption has been used?

Answer 1

I think compiling lists is a good idea. The only question is where to put them.

Using a meta tag such as community-faq feels like abusing the tag system. It is not a topic within security, and hence should not be a tag. A meta question is good, but it risks getting out of hand. There are surely ten XSS questions I would include, and a hundred topics like XSS...

I think there is already a feature intended exactly for this sort of thing - tag wikis. There they will be neatly arranged by topic. And who knows, someone asking questions might even stumble across them...

Still, the tag wikis will need some love for this to happend. So I would recommend picking something close to heart, and start listing. While at it, editing the linked questions could be a good idea. With a focus on making them more general, removing clutter, and writing good, descriptive titles.

That said, if someone feels like making a meta post of the most common ones to have them easily at hand, I wouldn't object.

Edit: Thinking some more about it, and looking at the examples in the question, I really do think a meta post with the most common ones (say < 25) would be helpful as a compliment to tag wikis.

Here is a list of the most common duplicate targets, might be helpful. Not all of them are actually good duplicate targets, though. Overly broad ones are not, for instance.