There are a few questions on this site that are in the form of "List all ...". Are these questions on topic?
Abbreviations before/after names
At first glance, they are just requests for lists (which can be done just as well on Wikipedia) and similar to polling questions. On the other hand, they are genuine questions and AFAIK do not go against the FAQ.
What does the community have to say?
I think this question should be closed because it will likely solicit debate and opinion, not revolving around facts or citing sources.
No, I kid. Kinda. In all seriousness, though, I think that these "list questions" add as much value as any other when they are written well and produce good answers. The idea is to learn. I know that for my question the top answer has undergone 28 revisions by 11 users (to date) and inspired a spinoff answer with the less flattering and more negative abbreviations associated with names written in Sefarim (even though it was not part of the question). The question itself has gotten 11 upvotes (to date), and the top answer has gotten 21 upvotes!
Why this should be deleted or closed just because it is a list is beyond me. I asked the question because I honestly did not know what some of these abbreviations meant, and, as someone who learns but was never trained on this particular item, it is 1)a little embarrassing to go to my Rav at my age and ask him what it stands for and 2)not so easy to remember the answer to all of the different abbreviations or versions of the same abbreviation. This has helped me out in many instances, and I actually consider it one of the best examples on the site in terms of the community posting and helping each other out to actually learn something factual about Jewish Life and Learning that some (in this case me) didn't previously know.
They don't match any of the no-nos listed at "What kind of questions should I not ask here?". So if they're on-topic and seek objective answers, I think they're fine.
That said, I closed "words often mispronounced" because it started to seem as though it would allow way too many answers to be readable. I suspect the same may be true of the question that inspired this meta question.
You do have a close choice for "too broad". What's the criteria for that?
some lists can produce hundreds if not thousands of answers. Example: "List all the places in Tana"ch where G-d speaks to someone." I would close such a question as being "too broad".
On the other hand, if someone asked "List all the melachot of Shabbat", and let's say there was no source that lists them already. Well, there are 39. Will you list all of them?
"List all the mitzvoth" - Assume there was no source already listing them. Will you list all 613 or is this past the limit of "too broad"?
Such questions seem (according to the general attitude of discussion in this thread) to be viewed as constructive, but risk being unwieldy.
Perhaps all such questions should be required to be asked as community wiki-questions (which I think makes all answers automatically into wiki-answers). Then each question should be limited to one answer, with one unified list in that answer.
I think that the criteria for judging whether a particular list is a good fit for this site is to see whether the individual items in the list would make good questions by themselves, but are more useful to the community when these individual questions are gathered in one place.
For example, asking for the meaning of a certain abbreviation which one finds in Torah related material is certainly a legitimate and useful question, and it makes much more sense to have similar such questions gathered together in one place - for findability and addabilty (newly coined words :-). (I would add that for this particular post I think it might be useful if there was a permanent link to it on the side of the page, since such abbr. are sometimes found in posts.
In the case of Techeiles wearers, I am guessing that someone who is trying to decide whether to wear it might ask if a certain Rav wears it or not to help them decide, and so a list in one place would be useful.
According to Wikipedia, it is obvious that lists are different than articles. Just pointing that out. Perhaps if you infer from this that normal questions on mi.yodeya are like articles on wikipedia, then lists are different than general questions on this site. For the record, what do some of the other SE sites do for list questions?
