For questions that are asked repeatedly on this site and for which general advice is appropriate for almost all cases. To be applied sparingly and after discussion on Meta. Canonical questions and their answers should be marked as community wiki.
Certain questions are commonly re-asked with minor variations: for example "will I be competitive for grad school X with profile Y?" or "My paper was assigned status code Z, what does it mean?" In some cases, the community has decided that we cannot / should not provide individualized advice (e.g., we cannot accurately predict a student's odds of admission, and should not compile a massive database of every possible status code for every possible journal). So instead, we create a "canonical question" with high-quality, general advice, and close questions as a duplicate of the canonical question. We realize that this can be frustrating for the asker, who was hoping for individualized advice, but we nonetheless hope that askers will be able to extract what they need from the canonical answers.
If you have an idea for a new canonical question, please open a post on meta to get approval. We generally try to be conservative about creating canonical questions; the site will dry up if every question is immediately closed as a duplicate of a canonical question! So, we try to create canonical questions only to correct a problem: for example, if a certain class of questions are generating a stream of low-quality, largely-identical answers.
We generally encourage the community to edit canonical questions / answers rather than creating competing posts. Therefore, both the question and the answer should be marked as community wiki.
