Coping with "abstract duplicates"/"variant questions"

Question

Taking a page from this meta.math.SE discussion, and in light of this question, I wonder if it would be worthwhile for us to maintain a community wiki post like this one in meta.math.SE that lists questions that a.) are likely to be asked, in ever so different variations, again and again; and b.) have canonical answers that completely address most of these known variations.

To use the question in main that I linked to as an example, the question is asking about the Filling option in Plot[] affecting the Table[] argument being plotted. It may well be that a few weeks from now, somebody would ask the very same question, but this time with PlotStyle, ParametricPlot3D[], and NestList[].

So: should we make a compilation of "abstract duplicate" questions?

Answer 1

I agree that this will be useful, I have actually brought up having a faq tag several times.

So, to make sure I understand you correctly:

• This is a proposal to have canonical versions of the most commonly asked questions. We can create these by editing and generalizing some of the existing questions about these topics. New questions about these problems can then be marked as a duplicate of the canonical version. There will be a meta post listing all these canonical questions and they'll be tagged faq.

Is this correct?

I support this proposal, and here are some suggestions on what we could include int the list:

• Combined numerical minimization and maximization (this is about situations where an f[x_?NumericQ] := ... type definition is needed to avoid some error messages)

• Plot draws list of curves in same color when not using Evaluate (your example question; why does Plot show all curves with the same colour when Evaluate is not used?)