Should there be a minimum Esperanto level for questions

2

Related to the questions about vocabulary which should be answerable by simply looking in a dictionary, should there be a limit on very basic questions?

Examples of questions which may be too basic:

  • How do you form the future tense of the word kuras?
  • What are the personal pronouns in Esperanto?
  • Is it mi havas hundo or mi havas hundon?

It seems to me that Stack Exchange should not be a beginner's course in Esperanto - and there are already good ways to get questions like the above answered. They're highly individual as well, so keeping them around to be reused doesn't have as much value.

asked 2016-11-02T13:19:24.447

None

What do you mean with "highly individual"? Ideally, any response would answer the question universally and explain the accusative etc. As Vanege writes below, new, similar questions will then be marked as duplicates.–None–2016-11-02T15:40:19.223

I think you caught my meaning. When a person is learning Esperanto, they have a lot of questions like "why does this sentence have an -n here" and "why is there no -n here". As for closing questions as dups, I'm not sure how that would work. That's like holding a class and the teacher answering "read the book."–None–2016-11-02T16:55:05.840

We add a link to the "canonical question" saying it is a duplicate of that one and they find their answer there. :-)–None–2016-11-02T17:27:43.557

This is interesting, btw: http://meta.stackexchange.com/q/3131–None–2016-11-03T13:56:54.717

And do look at this about "closing too easy questions": http://meta.stackexchange.com/q/3251–None–2016-11-03T14:00:51.110

1http://meta.stackexchange.com/q/3131 is about Stack Overflow and programming languages which in most cases don't allow to introduce new words in the grammar. What said there is not valid for natural languages, nor for sites about a single language.–None–2016-12-22T06:53:00.580

Answers

7

I see no reason to add artificial constraints to the acceptability of questions based on the level of Esperanto. If a question is low-level, experts don't have to answer necessarily, they can let other Esperanto-speakers answer. It is not a course. It is collaboration. Every Esperanto-speaker should be able to participate in answers, because no one is totally ignorant. Diversity of the level of questions is good for this.

How do you form the future tense of the word kuras?

This is a good question if a similar question never has been asked before.

If a similar question happens several times, people can edit the question to "How do you form the future tense of the verb" and link the newer duplicates to it.

asked 2016-11-02T13:19:24.447

None

If a question has an answer already, it shouldn't be edited.–None–2016-11-02T15:29:34.423

1To reiterate what Vanege said; from a community point of view some of the easier questions allow those of us who are are selves beginners to take part in answering questions and contributing to this stack exchange; there is no need for experts to answer. It is also useful to have lots of routes to canonical answers like "how to form the accusative" because a question like "How do you form the future tense of the word kuras?" might be prompted by an example in a course or on Duolingo and so might be googled by others.–None–2016-11-04T07:50:23.180

To this last point, we recently received a fairly basic question - whether you use a -n after da - and someone who has been around at least a little while answered the question. The answer was true, but didn't really explain the basic point - the -n is not used after prepositions to indicate the object of a sentence. If you come to Stack Exchange looking for expert advice, you should be hearing from experts.–None–2016-12-22T09:57:52.260