Please Down-Vote Beginner Questions

Question

Possible dupe of: Question quality

Dear Islam.SE users: we are deluged with low-quality beginner questions. By "beginner" questions, I mean questions that, if you spent less than five minutes searching even Google, you would find the answer. Seriously.

Islam.SE and all SE sites are expert Q&A forums. The point is expertise; you ask really hard questions and get really good answers. Not your common day-to-day stuff that you can find out with, seriously a little googling.

I know you don't want to hear this. I don't want to either. But either we start down-voting beginner questions, or we lose the site. It's not something to take lightly. Other sites on Area51 were shut down due to a lack of quality questions (and quality includes, being sufficiently experty).

Nobody likes down-voting, especially me. I know we can do better. Please, lets make this site an expert site for hard questions, not a beginner site.

Answer 1

Down-voting good beginner question is clearly against the goal of the site. This is not the way to build a site. We need good beginner questions. Without such questions the site will die and become inactive and terminated by SE. This is also against the practice on other similar sites like Judaism. An expert Q&A is where experts answer question, not a place where only questions by experts are allowed. If you think a question is not particularly good don't up-vote it. But down-voting a question because it is simple is a bad practice and will create the hostile environment for asking questions. A question should be down-voted when there is a clear problem with it not because you personally don't like it or find it too simple.

In place of down-voting other people's questions help them learn to write better questions, edit their questions to make them better, and lead by example not by punishment.

Please also read Robert's answer here.

Answer 2

I respectfully disagree. For one what qualifies as a simple question? Also, if we give a detailed, expanded answer to a simple or basic question it will increase the overall body of knowledge available on the site and help others in the future.

Answer 3

After seeing the community's view on this, as well as the types of answers we get on questions like that, I agree.

On the contrary to some of my previous questions/answers, I believe you are correct. The site isn't going anywhere without expert questions. Therefore, I will now try my best to down-vote any low-quality questions. I will also restrain from asking them. I hope others will do the same.