Basic questions are not so basic

Question

It has come up in other threads that we have a lot of "basic" or "lowest common denominator" questions. However, a few myths about this need to be put to rest.

First, we do have a general reference close reason, and we do use it. Questions which really are as basic as they seem can be closed, and should be closed.

However, there are a lot of "basic" questions which, under the covers, turn out to be linguistically interesting and involve subtleties which are invisible to native speakers. As a native speaker with decent writing or speaking skills, you may do things "automatically" which turn out to be extremely difficult to explain or rationalize. Elucidating what native speakers do by instinct is in fact very challenging, and a good explanation is a huge benefit to people attempting to learn the language. It makes the internet a better place for us to answer these questions.

Some examples:

• "I would have never said" vs. "I would never say"
• Difference between "are you done" and "have you done."
• Which is more correct here: "find" vs. "have found"?
• Is there a rule in preposition-using?

If you're a native speaker without any linguistic training, the answer to all of these questions may be obvious. But to a linguist or a language learner, these are all difficult and interesting problems! To paraphrase something Kit said in chat, the kind of person who says "I don't see what's so hard about..." is the person who shouldn't be in charge. If you are, say, the sort of person who scores in the 99th percentile on your GMATs, you may be the last person who can accurately gauge the difficulty and relevance of questions like these.

So we should make a few things clear in our FAQ and site definition:

1. Questions by language learners are on-topic.
2. Questions that are covered by all standard reference sources should be closed as general reference.
3. But questions that are obvious to native speakers are not necessarily general reference, and often are interesting and useful to learners and linguists both.

Point #3 brings up a kind of Catch-22: learners may not know whether their question is general reference without asking it. I propose that we as a community accept this ambiguity, and answer questions where the answers are difficult, and politely closing those questions which can be answered by any dictionary.

Answer 1

There's already guidance on this. Refer to the following chart:

The only caveat I can think of is that in step 1, above, you shouldn't answer questions that are explicitly off-topic for the site, even if they would satisfy the following rules. (For example, answering an Android question on the Apple site.) That sends the wrong message.

Answer 2

It is a hard and undeniable fact that new users that come to the site will expect "English Language and Usage" to accept General Reference questions. It does not matter if the description says: "linguists, etymologists, and (serious) English language enthusiasts." I think this will be emphasized for the users that have been a part of stackexchange communities, for example I think you will not find any significant number of questions on stackoverflow closed because they are too basic (This is not verified, just my opinion; I am aware that the issue has been debated. Ultimately for stackoverflow this does not matter so much as it is not as frequent as it is here.)

If feasible at all following approach might improve the quality of questions:

1. Have a short note that would say

A lot of question asked here are general reference questions. If you are about to ask a question such as "What is the meaning of the word apple?" then you are not at the right place. Please try to research it in dictionaries. Even if you don't find satisfactory explanation it will help you ask a better question and to get much better answers (and also to avoid having your question closed as general reference) if you can explain what exact aspect of the dictionary definition you have a problem with.

2. Also, once faq is fixed we could have (for new users only) the following attached to the submit question button.

I confirm that I have read the faq.