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There's tons of stuff I don't know about Vim despite using it on three OSes since 1993 or 94, so I keep running into new problems which are surely old problems "out there".

Should I post my new problems here first or if I find an answer somewhere on the interwebs should I leave my new question out of vim.SE?

I see metaquestions here about questions answered on other SE sites but what about if answers are on third party sites?

  • Is this site only for unique new problems?
  • Or should we not trust other sites to remain in existence and post them here to "make the web better" forever?

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Should I post my new problems here first or if I find an answer somewhere on the interwebs should I leave my new question out of vim.SE?

Remember: A sign of any good question is that the poster has put some effort into solving it. The text for the upvote button reads:

This question shows research effort; ...

So, you should look for answers on the interwebs. That's simply good practice.

Now, also note that answering your own question is encouraged.

So, what I would do is:

  • Do some research.
  • If nothing comes up, post a question.
  • If something does come up, but the solution was non-trivial, or tough to find, post a question and an answer detailing the solution.
  • If something comes up later on, and no one has posted that as an answer yet, post an answer.

I see metaquestions here about questions answered on other SE sites but what about if answers are on third party sites?

From what little experience I have on SE, that something is solved on a non-SE site is no bar to posting here. I would say the same reasoning that's applied to questions already on an SE site applies here as well:

If you think that a question could find a better answer here, post it.

Is this site only for unique new problems?

Certainly not.

Or should we not trust other sites to remain in existence and post them here to "make the web better" forever?

Well... We are still in beta. Not to sound pessimistic, but I would like to see Vi.SE stand on its own first.

(Also, I'd think that wholesale mirroring of content from some site would be frowned upon - but I don't know of any definite stance on that from the community. My Meta.SE-fu is not good enough.)

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    Great! This is pretty much my preferred approach on my SE home site (Travel). I do like to use beta sites as if they are real sites though, otherwise you're giving them a proper test so you won't know how ready they are for real world use if you filter out real world activities of any particular flavour. Wholesale mirroring is absolutely not what I'm asking about. That's bad mmmmkay.
    – hippietrail
    Apr 29, 2015 at 1:37

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