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There are a huge variety of different topics in economics, many open ended and divided. I think it'd be great if we could have some sort of wiki with a literature review of recommended papers (to read for undergraduates, laymen, researchers, et cetera). Just divide it up into topics like equilibrium, business cycle theory, rationality, game theory, et cetera.

It'd be nice to give such a wiki as a resource so people could potentially refer to the literature review instead of asking vague or general questions.

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I was tempted to say that this is largely accomplished by Palgrave, JEP, and the Handbooks of Economics series, but then I recalled this piece by Valerie Ramey, which notes some missing review in a Handbook chapter -- which itself I would never have found without a pointer from another economist. So yes, I could be convinced that there is a use for a wiki of this sort.

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I agree with the OP.

What can be done is: somebody can make a community wiki question, properly worded. Each answer is an economics specialization. There are added appropriate literature to each answer. Title the question: "recommended economic literature." That way, when somebody searches, the topic headings in the answer and the "literature" makes it the first result in a search.

Big-list questions are available on many SE websites. (For example, this on the mathoverflow site )

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Tag wikis could serve this purpose. On Stack Overflow, there are some pretty comprehensive tag wikis - see, for example, the one on the programming language C#

The problem is that the detailed tag wiki is near-invisible - I suspect that few people ever click on the tags, and of those that do, few of them ever click on the "learn more..." link that takes you to the detailed tag wiki.

Community wiki questions used to be used for this, but are no longer, and big-list questions are retreating across almost all the Stack Exchange network. There are exceptions, such as Math Overflow, that continue to do big lists and more frequent use of community wiki. But there is a reason why Math Overflow is so different: it grew up outside the SE network, and was imported as a mature site, with its own culture that had evolved very differently to the SE network,

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  • $\begingroup$ It's not really maturity of mathoverflow that makes it work. It's the fact that it's restricted to research level questions. Typical poor quality posts are very rare simply because they can be removed as strictly off topic. (A poor quality answer or question is typically not research level, by coincidence!) The various "big lists" are usually good quality therefore by coincidence, too, and do not end up cluttered. $\endgroup$
    – user218
    Nov 24, 2014 at 10:49

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