When we've talked about this situation, most people have had the opposite reaction: these questions often accumulate too many low-quality answers from new participants and get bumped when they shouldn't be. That's why we've been closing them.

It's also already really easy to find these questions: you can either click on big-list or you can rank by votes.

In particular, most people often don't bother to read all of the past answers and end up duplicating entries, which gets really annoying.

Scott and Qiaochu have hit the nail on the head. In fact, if you look at many of the older big-list questions, you can see that they've been closed for the reasons cited above. MO is mainly for the substantive questions. Big-list/soft-questions are merely a nothing more than a sideshow for the main event.

@gilkalai:

Nope, not at the moment. This has been requested by something like half of the people on meta, but as of now, there is no way for the staff to actually implement that change (even if they wanted to. If I remember correctly, Anton and Scott were both opposed to this change, but I'm not positive, and I'm sure that they will tell you themselves. Either way, I'm sure one of them can supply you a link to an old discussion of this precise issue.)

You could always install markdown and jsmath on your own computer and do a "write + compile" cycle using that. The difficulty with this is that there are many variants of markdown so you'd need to be sure to get the right one. Actually, you could do it with the javascript markdown that Anton wrote since that was designed to be the same as on MO.

So, here's how it could be done:

1. Write your question/answer in a text editor
2. Save it to a file and add some HTML wrapper tags around it
3. Add a javascript header to load the wmd.js and jsmath.js (which you should download from somewhere)
4. Look at the resulting file in your browser

Obviously, that's just an outline. In particular, one would need to tweak the javascript a bit and select the HTML wrapper stuff appropriately. But that would only need to be done once.

Probably not. You never know, someone might already have done it for you

The problem with that solution is that the remote preview is rrrrrrrrrrrreeeeaaaaallllllyyyyyyyyy ssssssslllllllllooooooooowwwwww. Downloading and installing the scripts locally makes the whole thing much faster. (This is what I do for nLab entries: I use the "It's all text" firefox extension to easily transfer a "text box" to an emacs session. Then I load in the latex bindings for emacs, except that I tell it to call "maruku" (the ruby version of markdown, which has itextomml built in) instead of latex and "firefox" instead of xdvi. Then I just do the normal "compile-and-view" cycle that I do for LaTeX documents until I'm happy with it, whereupon the "It's all text" extension reloads it back into the browser and I sent it off to the nLab for processing.)

The preview on MO is done locally. I can't think of any reason it would be slow. There's a timeout set so that if it takes more than three or four seconds to generate the preview, it won't bother, so the preview might slow down when you're writing a pretty long post. But even then it shouldn't interfere with typing into the input box and you can update the preview by just stopping typing for a couple of seconds.