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Is it possible to show how much a question or answer is for experts or newbies?

I see it as a newbie. My usual problems are:

  1. Does this question relate to my problem?

  2. Will this answer work for me too?

  3. Am I even able to get or follow the answer?

In other words, could there be a category (in question and answer):

  • this is for primary school (= very easy),
  • this is secondary school (= more complicated),
  • this is university (= even more complicated)?
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  • This is not school, no one is here to teach you and no one is responsible for your level of understanding. What is complicated for you, may not be complicated for me, or the other way round, so who decides what is the right way? It is on you to understand what you are reading and if an answer is the answer you are looking for, not the person answering a question.
    – Mark Kirby
    Commented Mar 6, 2018 at 11:48

2 Answers 2

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Ask Ubuntu and Stack Exchange is not a school, and there is no valid, usable mechanism to actually control the level of knowledge necessary to understand an answer or post. Attempting to build such a mechanism would also be counter-intuitive.

As was stated by Mark Kirby in the comments:

What is complicated for you, may not be complicated for me, or the other way round, so who decides what is the right way? It is on you to understand what you are reading and if an answer is the answer you are looking for, not the person answering a question.

Consider also that a good portion of the issues that 'new users' post about are non-trivial to solve, so answers are going to be given which require a certain level of familiarity with the system or some sort of knowledge to really understand what the answer does. And a lot of times, answers are just not able to be 'dumbed down' to the level of understanding that a brand new user will need. There're just times where answers can't be given for lesser-knowledgeable people to understand.

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  • You maybe right that who can say what is complicated and what is not. And you may get what you understand and you do not by yourself. It is right that answer can be a lot more complicated than question. I see it just from the point of view of user who is finding solution to a problem. And flag: that is easy would bring my attention. And flag: that is difficult may say: do not do it, you probably do it wrong. But I see this can be subjective and different in different topics. Now, I am basically oriented by voting number and green colour tick off.
    – weatherman
    Commented Mar 6, 2018 at 17:01
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IMHO, the solution is to read the answer in full before trying to replicate the given fix.

If the answer is simply "type this and that in the terminal window", you can try it and see if it works. It often does, even if the answer concerns an old distribution.

Sometimes I've copied-pasted stuff with no idea of what it meant, and it worked for me. If the problem recurs, I'll eventually learn the fix.

If the answer is "run this command and edit such configuration file accordingly", either do a lot of homework or forget it.

What I mean is, if you read the answer in full, you'll know if it is easy for you to replicate the given fix, or not. If it isn't, look for another answer.

If you can't find a simple answer, my advice is not to try to bump a three-years-old question (this tends to be ignored) but to post a new one.

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