Can certain "list-of-link generator" questions be allowed?

Question

I recently asked, are there any premade outdoor worlds suitable for testing 3D graphics? The question was put on hold:

Questions asking for resources are considered too broad here, unfortunately (because they are list-of-link generators); a good place to ask if the suggestions above aren't sufficient would be GDNet.

I agree that I'm basically asking for a list of links. I don't agree that that's a fundamentally non-worthwhile thing for this site, though it might be prone to difficulties.

In other words, there are bad (unproductive) list-of-link questions and good (productive, helpful, well suited to the community's interest and expertise) list-of-link questions.

The only prior discussion I can find on this is a Meta question from 2010: Should we allow "list of X"-questions? The consensus back then was that such questions were allowed but needed to be Community Wikis, which sounds reasonable to me.

Answer 1

There are two primary reasons we don't support these kinds of questions.

• Our "don't ask" page (and indeed all SE sites, as this one is not under our direct control) says to "avoid asking subjective questions where every answer is equally valid...". While the existence of some resource is an objective fact, that's not where the issue is. The subjectivity comes from the fact that any resource that exists answers the question, and there's nothing else for the site's machinery (voting) to chew on except popularity, which can be very subjective.

• The answers are link-only and devoid of almost any other content, and we destroy such answers per network policy.

Any guidelines that propose exemptions to the "lists of resources are off-topic" policy would need to thread those needles, as well as be something that the community itself can uphold (that is, not require constant moderator attention). I'm not sure I can think of any such guidelines that don't radically transform the question into something that is already on-topic, but perhaps somebody else could.

As for the community wiki angle; we don't use CW as a crutch for otherwise-bad questions. Community wiki is really, at this point in the network's lifecycle, something of a vestigial element. We don't really have a defined use for it, and all the attempts I can recall to try to institute a use haven't really gained any traction.

Answer 2

There are two nuances to my question that I think make the difference:

1. The information isn't readily available elsewhere. It's not, for example, like asking "what are some free 3D game engines?" which can be answered by the first page of Google.
2. It's not subjective, because it doesn't ask for the "best" resource, but rather any resource that reasonably fits the goal. The hope was for that broad frame to inspire answers catering to different tradeoffs. For example, "this scene's complexity is representative of contemporary games," or "this scene looks dramatically different under HDR," or whatever.

Given these criteria, or criteria like them, I think exceptions could be carved out of the broad rule against asking for resources.

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Stack Overflow has questions like The Definitive C++ Book Guide and List and they don't cause the world to come crashing down. (And evidently there is no binding network-wide policy forbidding them.)