What I would absolutely support and encourage is some functionality to make common questions much more visible and easier to find.
This would work great on Workplace too, where there are a bunch of really common questions about interviewing and employment and whatnot that everyone in the workforce might’ve once wondered and, especially if they hadn’t, be given the answer to. [Which are, of course, endlessly duplicated, because there’s no proper reference for most of them and everyone just answers instead of going in search of it]
On specific tags (i.e. languages) on Stack Overflow, this may also come in handy to reference particularly common errors or misunderstandings.
There are remnants of this happening in tags wikis, Meta and some main posts on some sites, but nothing really works all that well because it isn’t functionally supported.
I don’t think such FAQ’s should be separated, but rather come about in the natural progression of things.
In some cases, yes, users might need to create a canonical post from scratch that’s a bit broader and more complete than the typical question on the site. Even these should ideally be phrased as actual questions though, and don’t much benefit from being separated either. Although, in an ideal world, they too would come about in the natural progression of things, as users realise they need to keep adding more details for a post to fully make sense and cover the more significant variations of the question.
Perhaps these FAQ’s or canonical posts could be tagged in some way after the fact and/or linked in manually curated pages or lists somewhere. Manual work is best avoided, but it might be necessary because an unordered, unformatted list might not be that useful, even if the posts themselves are extremely useful. The tag wiki is probably a good comparison (despite its weaknesses), as it allows a detailed article to be written about some topic closely related to what’s on the site, but, at the same time, slightly outside it.
I don’t have a problem with either of those.
I should probably stop using those terms interchangeably and as if everyone agrees on the meaning.
What I basically mean is that we should avoid having another over nine THOUSAND questions (meme partially intended) asking for help with a NullPointerException. One is good. Two is too much. And no, your question is not different because yours contains 200 lines of code that isn’t in the other question or because you were wearing a silly hat at the time. [But yes, there may technically be some non-duplicates if this exception happens in the depths of some specific library and is in no way caused by an error in your code, although this is more the exception than the rule]
The important part, to start off with, is to agree on the core content: the questions, not to figure out the specifics of how to support FAQ’s or what sort of articles we should have on top of that. That can come later.