Board Thread:Consensus Track/@comment-9782468-20190501011316/@comment-3279282-20190503203313

Is it, though? Ideally, the process should be something like this: A user wants to know something about the Naruto manga, so they come to us, look up the relevant article, where their question is hopefully answered. If not, they put up a thread in the forums. And that's perfectly fine. It's the same for the rules, after all: We expect users to read the rules before they use the wiki, edit articles or whatever.

However, in reality, the process looks like this: A user has a question about the Naruto manga. Instead of reading the article, they go to the forums and post their question, expecting others to basically do the user's work again. Emphasis on the last word, because 1) we pre-emptively answer the question by writing articles and 2) we again answer the question by answering the forum thread.

However, that is not a wiki's purpose. We're an encyclopedia first and foremost. Our objective is to answer questions before they're even asked. Every user should first visit the relevant articles before asking their question. Else, what sense would those articles even have? If users ignore them and just go straight to the forums.