There are many questions which are basic and probably will be asked sooner or later on a site about Portuguese. Should we try to post these questions now, to make sure we have questions for everyone once (or if) we "go public"? Or should we wait until someone else posts them?
(Also see Sobre questões superficiais)
This is my opinion on it:
Experimenting? Sure. While in private beta, we can try out a variety of questions and use them as examples when discussing what is on-topic. If exploring the boundaries of what is on-topic, I'd say:
Seeding? No. However, I don't think "to make sure we have questions for everyone" is a good reason. Filling the site with many fake questions would dilute attention to real questions; and on a language site, I think we do not need to worry about having too few questions. (I have no statistics to back that up; it is just my hunch.)
Guessing? No. If you know the answer to your question already, there is a good chance that you aren't asking a question that is useful to others. I am a learner, and I don't think I would ever need to ask Conserto ou Concerto?, for example. I don't see much reason to have such a question unless the OP really doesn't know (which isn't clear to me, but might be the case). I don't mean to argue against canonical Q&As, but they should have some grounding in questions people actually ask.
In my humble opinion, of course.
So what? Others sites across the internet usually don't have any kind of quality control. We do! If you copy and paste the first result for a simple answer here you'll probably get some rep points, but if a better answer is written especially for that question it will be better ranked than the previous one.
So, who is lazy now? The OP that didn't care to search on Google before or the ones that don't want to spend their valuable time to answer a better answer than a copy-and-paste one?
Let's make Portuguese Language the site that everyone loves to look for the content they're interested, due to the high amount and quality questions and answers they can find here. This happens to me when I'm searching for some programming question, I give full preference to StackOverflow, because in most of the cases it has the best and direct answer, I prefer to not spend time looking in other sites.
Simple for whom? A simple question for one might not be as simple to others. Argumentations that the question is so simple that should be closed, for me is lack of humbleness. What about people that don't know the answer? How would they feel if they ask a simple question that community consider that it doesn't deserves to be answered? Where are they going to look for this information?
Furthermore, what damage does it cause to the community?
Who cares? When you answer you're not helping an individual, you're helping an incountable number of anonymous visitors that visit the site every single day.
Accordingly to the Area 51, 90% of the traffic comes from search engines, these people deserves an answer for what they're looking for.
Hell yes! This is an Question & Answer website, right? Sure we have to populate it with questions. Or does anyone think that is it a better idea to populate it with pedantic comments?
There are many questions which are basic and probably will be asked sooner or later on a site about Portuguese. Should we try to post these questions now, to make sure we have questions for everyone once (or if) we "go public"? Or should we wait until someone else posts them?
If the OP spends effort enough to make them high quality, why not to ask now?
Let's cut the crap out and start to answer questions instead of discussing on what is the better way to make the OP feel more miserable.
Questions are what make the site moves, without them we can't go on. Let's make effort on "How to make this question more adequate to the site", instead of the exactly oppose.
