Why so much tolerance for undifferentiated CMS recommendation questions?

Question

There's a class of "What CMS should I use for $project?" question in which $project has no particular features of interest, ie. just about any minimally-capable CMS would be able to handle it.

For some reason these don't get closed or even down-voted half the time, resulting in what looks like a race for first slot at saying "Use WordPress" and logging a bunch of upvotes regardless of that application's real fitness to task. Occasionally, Drupal and Joomla might get tossed in for variety, but usually as a group with little explanation why one over another. It's bad that it happens, but just annoying when it's allowed on topics that actually do have potential to be unique.

A thread floated up here a few weeks back where someone was doing some aggressive clean-up/merging/migration on some other repeat topic (I can't recall what right this moment). Maybe that needs to start happening with this?

Answer 1

I agree that many CMS questions can't be answered beyond, "Pick one. They're all pretty good!"

Paul pointed out this superuser blog post in Chat the other day as an example of how they've dealt with typical 'shopping list' -style questions. In short, they created this community FAQ to help those trying to decide between different hardware options.

I suggest that we do the same for CMSes, (and possibly for shared hosting, VPS hosting, and dedicated hosting) then close as duplicate any related questions by pointing them to the relevant community FAQ.

Of course, there will always be some questions that are specific enough not to need merging with the FAQs, and I think it's worth letting those questions stand.

Answer 2

In general I agree that "which CMS" questions with very few criteria aren't good. The question you link to does have potential to be unique, and I've contributed there. However I also think Wordpress is a good fit for any very simple site (<10 pages say), so is a good answer there too.

So with that particular question I think the answers are mostly better quality (though I've downvoted a couple) than the other questions you've talked about. Yes, maybe we need to be more vigilant with other "which CMS" questions.

Answer 3

Is this something that could be a candidate for a canonical question / answer pair?

e.g. pick the "best" of the bunch and make it the all time authoritative, constantly edited and updated reference "which CMS should I use?" question and close all others as duplicates of it?

http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/01/the-wikipedia-of-long-tail-programming-questions/

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