Question: I often see lots of questions that are along the lines of 'What is the best software / tool for X?', or 'What is your favorite trick for x?'. 

They seem to be the sort of questions that generate the most reputation, at least on serverfault. I kind of don't like these questions, but that is just me so I am wondering what the official take is. Is there another question that someone should ask themselves when posting this sort of question that determines if it is appropriate?

I personally don't mind, 'I am looking for a good tool to do the specific task of X'. Just the general / vague ones. 

*Are these good questions? should they be community wiki?* 

I am *sure* this has been asked before, but I couldn't find it searching this site.

Answer: 
I tricky one; I think there is a big difference between asking the right tool for a specific job, and just wanting a "coolest" thread. We might have some old and long old posts, but IMO many of the new "funniest" / "coolest" really deserve deletion; they add nothing... and should *certainly* be wiki if they live...

I'm not hugely involved in superuser, but my *perception* is that a lot of people have suggested that the signal:noise on superuser is suffering badly because of these. I wonder if we might not need to get stricter about this to keep SU from degenerating.
My instinct is to want more designations for questions, because I professionally find the "tools" posts to be FAR more useful (and appropriate for rep, tho maybe at half the level of actual questions) than the "joke" and "funniest" posts (which should have rep stripped from them, IMO, they have nothing to do with technical skill).

On the other hand, since they all fall into "not the stated purpose for the site" bucket, I could see where there's a lack of interest in creating the administrative overhead to subdivide questions into additional categories.