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There are things I like here, but I don't think all of it will work.

I like the following:
- Welcoming specific questions rather than only general questions.
- Including hints at more general solutions when giving a specific answer.

However, I can't see a way to make separate categories work for the 2 types of question - I would expect this to be impossible in practice.

## Where to draw the line?
The idea of 2 categories, one for specific questions and one for general questions, is very appealing. We already have the ability to easily add a new category to a community, and this would keep both types of question within a single community for ease of progressing from specific to general.

The problem becomes apparent when trying to assign individual questions to categories.
- The abstract concept of a specific-style question belongs in the specific questions category.
- The abstract concept of a general-style question belongs in the general questions category.

However, a real question is not an abstract concept, and will be difficult to assign solely to one category or another.

Different people are likely to have different opinions about where to draw the line between specific and general. Wherever the line is drawn, it will be an uncomfortable compromise leading not only to objections, but also to genuine confusion. This confusion will be elevated by the fact that the person choosing which category is the question asker, who is likely to have insufficient insight into the problem to make an informed decision.

## The help spectrum
The difficulty of where to draw the line between specific and general can be highlighted by considering that the step from "how do I do this?" to "how do I work this out for myself?" can be repeated many times. During learning, the progression from asking for a concrete fix to asking for a technique happens repeatedly, leading to gradually more abstract approaches:

- **"How do I solve this problem?"**  
"Do this"
- **"How do I decide how to solve this problem?"**  
"Run this command and decide based on the output"
- **"How do I determine which command will help me solve this problem?"**  
"Consult this documentation"
- **"How do I decide which documentation to consult?"**  
...

A similar progression can be imagined by stretching the fishing metaphor:

- **"I feel weak and light headed"**  
"You're hungry"
- **"I'm hungry"**  
"Here, have a fish"
- **"How do I get more fish?"**  
"Here's how to catch them yourself"
- **"How do I avoid driving them to extinction?"**  
"Here's how to monitor the various species and decide which size fish to catch"

Just as giving someone a fish leaves them with none the next day, teaching someone to catch fish leaves them with an empty lake on some future day. The general form of a specific question is not inherently general, it's just more general than the previous question. It's also more specific than questions that will arise later. This makes categorisation arbitrary and impracticable.

At each step in this progression, the previous step seems like a specific question, even though it may be the general version of a step further back. For this reason I can't imagine 2 categories working, and adding more categories for the extra layers of abstraction is likely to only make the problem worse.

## Encouraging specific questions and general answers
Although I can't see categories being the solution here, I would like to see people encouraged to ask specific questions, and encouraged to add general advice to their answers to such questions. The same argument that I have used to suggest that categories wouldn't work also suggests that excluding specific questions would be very difficult. How do you agree on which questions are to be excluded?

I also agree that specific questions are a vital route towards later more general questions. If we want general questions, we need to make sure people feel welcome to post specific questions.