4

We have a few questions asking for recommendations of books, movies or the like, e.g.:

These question do have some value to give learners a starting point where to look for good and easy to understand material, and they have quite high views.

But answers to these questions are growing endlessly, as expected from these kind of questions. The more answers we have the less we will help visitors to find a good answer amongst the many. This is even more so as the voting system will always fail on these big-list questions and gems will inevitably be hidden somewhere amongst the lot.

Now what to do with these questions? Should we close them as "not constructive" (i.e. not a good fit to our Q&A site), should we protect them to at least limit clutter, or should we just leave them (running out of hand)?

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  • Every time that I request a question be protected, my request is ignored. So yes, protection is what I would recommend. – Eugene Seidel May 9 '13 at 7:22
  • @EugeneSeidel: just write this as an answer so that people can vote on it if they agree. All users > 3500 rep can protect questions. – Takkat♦ May 9 '13 at 7:25
  • I see that you protected a bunch of big-list Questions. Excellent move. Big-list Questions are effective at bringing in people to GLU for the first time who come in via a search engine. Some of them may feel disappointment briefly when they see the Q is Protected. Then they realize there are plenty of other Q's for them to answer. And the 10 rep points minimum for replying to a protected Q is surely not too onerous a requirement. – Eugene Seidel May 21 '13 at 7:55

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