How to deal with multiple questions asked in one?

Question

There are many questions currently in our system that have more than one distinct question stuffed into a single posting.

Two quick examples:

• Cholent falafel Bracha
• Why is chicken “meat” (w.r.t. basar bechalav)? And about eggs

Having these "multiple questions" is a serious detriment to our long-term usage, and needs to be taken care of.

There are really two things that need to be discussed:

• What to do with all the previous questions? How to deal with them?
• What to do in the future when such things happen? Do we immediately edit it and post the second question, or allow the user to do that himself (with a friendly comment)?

Answer 1

In some cases (including this very meta question!), question parts are linked enough that I think it's fine for them to coexist in one question. Neither of the examples you cite qualifies, since they each ask about multiple unrelated foods, with no suggestion, e.g., that they might be governed by similar principles.

Just on the future aspect for now:

Ideally, I'd like to have the original author get credit for all of the questions, so I'd recommend commenting (perhaps with fairly forceful language), giving the author a chance to split first, and waiting maybe one business day before splitting it yourself. I also like the idea Shog9 suggested in a comment: Immediately edit out all additional questions and put a comment directing the author to the revision history and the Ask button to copy them out and enter them as new questions.

Answer 2

(For future questions, I like Isaac Moses's answer. I also like the distinction it makes between "good" and "bad" multi-question questions.)

Perhaps for past questions that already have answers (or even comments) addressing multiple parts of the question, add a comment saying that the question is grandfathered but that such questions are no good for the future. (Also maybe close it as "not a real question", but IMO not.)