Talk:Answers
Purpose and process of these pages
"Answers" was created as a new means of outreach to community and readers that were not served by existing contact paths. As Answers/Process indicates, it was intended to serve several purposes - (1) to collect and aggregate questions of general interest for transparent public response, (2) to individually assist those with questions more suited to individual answer, often by redirecting them to the appropriate staff member or volunteer process.
Many of our contacts fall into category 2, and a good number of those are repetitive. (We do receive a steady stream of questions that need individual response, but I'd say "Can I use your content?" and "I don't like the article about me" are the most common contacts we receive.) In 2014, these pages were overhauled (coinciding with the folding of business@ into answers@) to offer a sidebar "help" system that answers the most common of these. However, general interest questions do happen. I'd like to make them easy to find, and especially I'd like to make it easy to find new ones, so that those who are interested can easily see when something is added without going through "recent changes". I'd also like to make it possible for translators to translate the process pages and the answers themselves. All of this adds up to some complexity. :)
The current process I'm hoping to follow with "general" answers is:
- Add the answer to the appropriate dated archive page (for instance, Answers archive 2014).
- Link to the answer at Answers/Index.
- Add the answer to {{Answers recent}}