As anyone with an interest in vegetarianism, veganism, and other diet-related fields knows, there's a lot of conflicting, often made-up or half-baked information floating around, plus everyone likes to chime in with their own personal experience, what worked for them or didn't, and what they heard from a friend. (I'm no exception.)
That is all great in a forum, but may not necessarily be where we want to take this Q&A site. Or do we? I come from Stack Overflow, where everything is super strict and anything even slightly outside the on-topicness rules closed within minutes, and I shudder at the thought of open-ended, subjective questions to which basically everyone's own experience is a valid answer. But hey, maybe I'm being too strict!
So you understand what I'm talking about, examples from the current stock of questions:
And also maybe, although that's probably a grey area
(That's not to call out those specific questions; we're here to find out what works and what we want, after all!)
Is there an issue here? Do we want to set guidelines on such questions? Where on the spectrum from "You must back up all claims with peer-reviewed citations" to "Anyone's opinion on the question is welcome" do we want to settle? Both extremes sound awful. Is there a different way altogether to approach this?
How do other lifestyle-related Stack Exchange sites deal with it?