On topic-ness for questions covering publisher documents

Question

In this question,

What is the minimum required compatibility level to use parallel SELECT INTO?

the poster contends that the question is relevant because it is

I'm documenting a fact that is not documented elsewhere on the web in an easily searchable way

Specific to their question, my first hit was an article published a year ago Exploring SQL Server 2014 SELECT INTO Parallelism but there were plenty of other articles that cover it.

From a general case though, is cherry picking new features from documentation and then forming questions around them on-topic for our community? Does information only existing in one location sufficient to warrant Q&A?

Answer 1

Specific case

I believe it to be on-topic, and a reasonable* wiki contribution that benefits the site overall.

My own assessment is that the contributor faced a real-world problem (parallel SELECT INTO not working as expected), found the answer, and decided to contribute that experience. It may not always be easy to judge the background and intention in such cases, but the user in question has a good history of high quality contributions to this site.

The self-answered aspect is a red herring. A good (or at least reasonable) question and/or answer that meets the site guidelines is welcome regardless of who provided it. In any case, Stack Exchange sites explicitly encourage good quality self-answered questions. That link is even featured on the Ask Question page:

_{*The existing question and answer do leave scope for improvement.}

General case

Very basic questions with an answer easily located in official documentation are likely to be closed (probably as too localized) by the community.

I don't believe any special measures need to be applied to account for the "cherry picking" scenario. The normal voting, closing, and flagging mechanisms should handle this perfectly well, should it ever occur.

Answer 2

Just an additional thought. Sometimes a self-answered question has no evident answer that's easily searched when it's asked. But then, at a later point in time, it does. So the value of the self-answered question for the community has changed over time.

But like others, I don't think this requires a special case solution.