What CDO is giving you is typical uses, not restrictive definitions. What precisely (or vaguely) is meant by these utterances is more dependent on the discourse situation than on any specific meaning either of them expresses.
For instance, one of my colleagues may ask me tomorrow "What was the concert like?" I know that she doesn't know anything about the music of Koji Kondo and that what she's really trying to convey is that she remembers my mentioning last week, with some bemusement, that I was taking my son to a performance of music from the Zelda games and she hopes it wasn't too tedious for me. I will reassure her that "We had a really good time".
On the other hand, my son's friends are mostly musicians, and if one of them asks him "How was the concert?" he will probably answer something like "The first trumpet seemed to have chops problems, he had a lot of high entrances and was usually a quarter-tone flat. But the arrangements were very cool, a lot of Debussy in it, and the video synch-up was kick-ass."
Your own phrase, "giving freedom for the other person to choose the content of her answer", expresses the situation admirably. Neither I nor my son pay any attention to how the questions are worded: he and I, and our interlocutors, address our audiences and our social situations.
They are called reported questions with question words.
If there is a question with a question word in Direct Speech, (what, where, why, who, when, how) use this question word in Reported Speech. Again there is no auxiliary verb and the word order is like an affirmative sentence
- Peter: “What time did the train leave?”
- Peter asked me what time the train had left.
Best Answer
When asking a question like this, think of how you would answer the question.
Correct:
The answer is, "[My name is] Keiki."
The answer is, "[It is done] like this."
The answer is, "[We connected to the server] like this."
Incorrect:
"[Is my name] Keiki," is another question, not an answer.
"[Is it done] like this," is another question, not an answer.
"[Did we connect to the server] like this," is another question, not an answer.
I can't tell you the technical term for why this is correct, and like all rules, there are probably exceptions, but I think it's pretty easy to remember like this.