What (type of) bike should I buy?

Question

The forum seems to be getting almost one of these questions per day at the moment.

Whilst each question contains its own nuances (so probably unreasonable to dismiss them as duplicates), the questions are nevertheless very similar to each other.

And while the actual answer might be different dependent upon the OPs specific requirements, the thought process guiding the choice is pretty much identical in all cases. For example there are only so many different types of bike, which might narrow depending upon the terrain(s) the OP intends riding. Etc. etc. Also for example the pros and cons of buying from their LBS as opposed to the web (I mean, presumably if they're newbies and coming to SE to ask questions they have already ruled out their LBS, possibly wrongly.)

I was just wondering whether the existing SE framework has the scope to maintain some kind of static page that people could just be pointed to?

I'd be happy to contribute to this page although to be honest I'm sure there must be lots of information on the web already, so maybe only a collation exercise is required?

Answer 1

I don't think these are a good candidate for community wiki.

I do think these are itching for a solid "canonical question". Essentially, somebody asks a version of the question that covers as many of these kinds of questions as is practical to cover in one answer (perhaps one question for commuter bikes, one for recreational road bikes, etc?), and we get "one answer to rule them all". Then we can close the other questions as duplicates of the canonical answer.

Or, if one question and answer already covers the ground really well, we should identify that best question and answer and close the others as duplicates of that.

To be really thorough, a meta post identifying our canonical questions on all topics should be put together for future reference, like this: https://meta.serverfault.com/questions/1986/what-are-the-canonical-answers-weve-discovered-over-the-years