What to do if an answer is a general one but the question is rather narrow?

Question

My Idea here is this:

General question are good questions. But sometimes a user asks a narrow question that is really a much broader general question (especially if the user has a specific problem with one app that applies to all apps).

Narrowly asked example: Force Google Maps to save cached maps on SD card

Generic example: "How can I move parts of an apps internal app data to the SD card"

Issues I have with this specific question here:

• The users problem is gone
  Both Maps' 6.8.1 and 6.9.0 tiles cache is on SD afaik: /scard/Android/data/com.android.google.maps/
• Some other users might want to know the generic answer to other apps but may not find this question/answer

So: Should one then rewrite the topic or what?

Answer 1

If there is narrow-specific answers that could work on the particular situation but not in the general situation, then the question should stay. If a narrowly-defined answer could have additional information that helps the user better than one written for the general questions in mind, then the question should stay.

For example, an answer to move the app to SD using one of the many standard app2sd methods would be general enough, a link to the general answer would be sufficient; but creating a symbolic links for the cache folders at /foo/bar/myappcache/ would be a narrow answer that have its own merits. If the only reasonable answer is a link to the general question, then the narrow question should be marked as exact duplicate.

There is no need to generalise every single narrow questions; some duplication of this kind is good because people uses different search queries in the search engine and might skip questions whose title are too generic when browsing the search results.