Should questions prompting brainstorming new solutions to political problems be in-scope?

Question

In comments on a question related to fake news, a moderator responded to my edit trying to narrow the question with the following:

The problem with this question is that this is a question&answer website, not a discussion forum. We are here to explain how politics and political processes work. We are not here to brainstorm new solutions to political problems. This doesn't really work with the Stack Exchange system. So you might want to bring up this topic on a more discussion-oriented website. – Philipp ♦ 3 hours ago

Perhaps I misunderstand the limits of this forum, I would think that questions calling for brainstorming of solutions (technical or political/economic) would be acceptable.

On StackOverflow, software developers ask questions that prompt brainstorming solutions right? There may not be a single "right" answer, but expert input on directions that might prove helpful seem welcome there.

Answer 1

Such brainstorming questions have several problems.

• There are no "right" or "wrong" answers. When you are asking for a technical solution on Stackoverflow, then you can try out the answers yourself and come to the conclusion "doesn't work, -1" or "does work, +1, answer accepted". But that doesn't apply to answers to political problems. Unless you happen to be a high-ranking politician yourself, you do not have the power to simply "try out" solutions and say which work and which don't. And if you want to start a political movement, then "some guy on Politics Stack Exchange says it would work, and it got 17 upvotes!" is unlikely to be a convincing argument to get politicians on your side.
• Which answer raises to the top is based on political bias. To take the question linked above as an example, the already posted answers neatly represent (from oldest to newest) the social-democratic approach ("undermine the business model through taxation and regulation"), the libertarian approach ("free market might solve it if people are educated enough, and if it doesn't it's the price we have to pay for liberty") and the authoritarian approach ("give someone the power to forbid it"). Which one is the "best" approach? This depends on your own political leanings and ideals. Now you could say "Let's make this a popularity contest and let the votes decide!" But now the best answer will be skewed by the majority political view of our community. The top answer would not necessarily be the answer which is the best written, the one which would objectively have the best results or even the one which would receive the most votes if our community were a more representative sample of the population.
• They attracts partisans. A recurring problem on this website are people who participate with the goal to spread their ideology. We want this community to inform about politics and political processes from a neutral and non-evangelizing point of view. So these people are not welcome here. However, such open questions are very attractive to them, because they can easily be used as an excuse to write an answer which promotes a specific point of view.

Answer 2

Questions that accept unsourced speculations are off topic.

However some questions of this type may be fixed by asking to enumerate existing/proposed solutions of the problem while providing the sources: What are the known/tried/suggested solutions of the problem? It might be possible to get a good overall picture while reading multiple answers, even if some are biased by listing only ideology specific solutions.

Some questions may be also too broad, if too many solutions are historically known. But the answer listing all major approaches known, with references and examples, would probably be enough on topic here.