Are discussions about the field of TCS off-topic?

Question

This has been raised several times and we should make a group decision. Raised before:

• Developing a CW policy.
• Are list questions such as about conferences on-topic?
• Places to look for articles and discussions

Are questions about the field of TCS on or off topic? Examples would be lists of books, journals, or conferences.

Assuming that they're off-topic, Robert Cartaino has already stated that these questions should not be posted on meta (even though there was some community support for the idea):

Because it is off-topic against the purpose of the site. There's already a wide-spread belief that if something is off topic, you just make it community wiki. You don't need to add another layer to that.

So we need to determine:

1. Are questions about the field really off-topic?
2. If they are off-topic, does that mean that they can't be asked on meta?

These decisions should go into our FAQ.

Answer 1

Questions about the field are certainly not off topic. I'm also not in favor of making them meta. I think we will have to live with them on the main site, enforce CW and (maybe) big-list and soft-question tags, and let people who don't like them use tagging to exclude them (this is what I've done on MO, with the soft-question tag)