Would adding a beginners section to this site make it easier to use?

Question

I have been using Ask for a while now, but have noticed a problem, there are many spam questions, if you will.

To clarify my meaning if you search the site for things like "how to burn a live CD" or "do I need drivers" or "cant connect to wifi" etc.. you will find thousands of Q and A's on these subjects with the same answers. This makes it difficult for new users to navigate the site as there are so many questions that are just worded a bit different, splitting the main page in to two sections would make it much easier to keep track of duplicates.

Also this would benefit the people like me who answer these beginners questions and let more advanced users focus on more technical questions.

Ubuntu gains popularity every day and this will bring more and more beginners to the site asking the same questions.

I don't want to go on to much so what do you guys think?

Answer 1

No, people don't come here based on "I'm a new user SHOW ME ALL THE THINGS". People come to the site (at least over 90% of them) via search engine traffic. IE: "This is broken, how do I fix?". Adding a beginner section will only just fracture the site.

Furthermore, what constitutes a beginner question? That alone is largely subjective and impossible to say what would be a beginner, what wouldn't, etc.

What I would recommend, you (and others) add tags that you know how to answer. Say, things like nautilus or ubuntu-one. Software which you're familiar with and feel comfortable answering. That way you can easily pick these out. On the flip side, you can add tags that you have no interest in (maybe server stuff like server, mysql, foo, etc.

Answer 2

I'd like to think this site is already a "beginners site". Or more accurately, it is friendly to beginners and experienced people alike.

It's a lot more friendly toward beginners than other communities including forums and mailing lists. This is from my observation.

I don't see any conflict in letting beginners' questions continue to be asked among all the other questions, and I don't see much evidence of hostility toward beginners for asking "dumb" questions. Certainly not like you would see, as I said, on the mailing lists or even some forums.