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This question has made me wonder whether we should have a few of the more political FAQs as community wiki as a resource.

The advantage would be that they do come up often, and having a wiki listing the various arguments would allow us to point people at that rather than having people repeatedly say "this site answers questions about bicycles, why not these obvious ones?" It would also serve as a useful wiki-style resource, rather than the heap of blog posts and articles that are static and single-person PoV.

Against this are that the questions are not really "solve my problem" so much as "help me by making a list", which is not encouraged. The answers will often be opinion-based, even Wikipedia has run away from some of those arguments, and the posts could well attract negative attention (edit wars, anti-cyclists joining and participating to get enough rep to edit, etc).

The questions that I think we could start with are:

  • bicycle registration
  • bicycle rider licenses
  • mandatory third party insurance

All of which regularly generate excited commentary in the wider world, and have a series of stock arguments that many of us could recite in our sleep. They also have experimental and theoretical evidence for or against, which is IMO the saving grace - the answers will not be purely opinion.

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  • Another one to start with would be pro's and con's of wearing a helmet and the question if wearing a helmet should be mandatory.
    – Benedikt Bauer
    Aug 5, 2014 at 8:09
  • This sounds similar to Community FAQ's we do on Super User.
    – nhinkle
    Aug 15, 2014 at 21:45

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Yes, different answers that clearly state the argument for or against [whatever] are IMO helpful to people.

Those arguments either confirm someone's prejudice about the question, or help the open minded reach their own conclusion. It's a knowledge base.

Many of these questions (I'm thinking there could be more than those 3) have regional answers. That's OK, because people can see how it's done here or there, or the arguments here or there.

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I like the idea of this, if only because it should cut down on the number of separate questions which are near identical (and we can point towards a community wiki).

Of course, people will still ask them without searching, but the duplicate mark exists for that reason...

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  • And hopefully, if we write it well, our Community Wiki will come up as a suggestion as they type.
    – andy256
    Aug 4, 2014 at 3:11
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    Yeah, but whose actually going to read that? :-|
    – Batman
    Aug 4, 2014 at 3:12

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