When should questions be closed for being too basic?

Question

I could ask this on StackOverflow's meta, but I feel like the Ethereum Stack Exchange deserves its own conversation for a few reasons.

I've come across a number of questions that ask for very basic information. I just saw one yesterday asking how to connect Geth to an RPC, I've seen others with very, very beginner questions about Solidity and web3, to the degree that they were almost questions about beginning programming. How should we respond to questions like these? While there may be an instinct to close them, I think arguments can and should be made for keeping them open and answering them.

Ethereum enjoys being a smaller and a more tight-knit community than the gigantic SO platform, and we also (imho) have the goal of attracting non-developers to the platform. The Ethereum community in general, in my experience, strives to be as open and accepting as possible. I think this community ethos should allow for a more permitting environment for very beginner questions. Someone who's just starting out might not understand how to navigate Geth's docs, even if they're very clear for me.

Another potential concern is the language barrier. A number of questions seem to come from users who do not speak English as a first language, and sometimes clearly do not speak it very well. This would obviously hamper even an experienced dev from being able to find the right documentation, and makes a convergence on this platform as a general repository of (even basic) knowledge understandable.

I'd like to open up conversation around this, and see what the general opinion from the meta crowd here is. Do you agree? Do you disagree? Especially if you disagree, where should the line be drawn, though this is also a question if you agree.

Thanks for taking the time to read this!

Answer 1

Beginner questions should be encouraged. The Ethereum community is still very small and there are few developers working in this field. You have to start somewhere, so why not here? Many questions also come from non-developers that are just Ethereum users (especially DeFi), and this is pretty much the only place where you can get qualified answers.

We should make an effort to answer basic questions in a more general manner so that they are useful for more people. For instance, if someone asks why his tokens were stolen, we should not only answer that particular problem, but also give general security advices that apply to everyone.