I guess this is the counterpart of the elitist question but asking about the other side of the spectrum.
How friendly should the site be to complete LaTeX and even operating system (say command line) beginners?
This question came out after some discussion of currently the most voted answer here where the OP further asked how is she supposed to run some command. Are we supposed to answer this kind of questions?
Also I was playing roles and pretending to be a beginner to see the kind of responses I would get. With some early disappointment. I was given an answer but no knowledge as to why this was an answer, even though I was clearly confused (in my role) and had no clue about what I was doing. (I have to admit, maybe the whole role-playing thing also confused the people answering my question as they assumed that I do know at least the basics of LaTeX). But the point is that, in the end, I was given a fish when probably what I needed was to learn how to fish for myself.
I actually think this is a rather big problem with the TeX/LaTeX culture at large. The web is plagued with lots of snippets of TeX hacks and the like, which people have been happily copy/pasting for years without knowing what they're doing. This results, as I've mentioned in that thread, in really lots of people scattering \\
's and \noindent
's everywhere in their documents. Once I've been an editor for the proceedings of a small conference, I don't want to tell you about the kind of horrible code abuses I saw there.
So from the beginning I had been trying to push forward this TeX-StackExchange initiative because I think this could be a solution to that problem. Because here we can edit and keep the answers current and up to date (some people out there are still using eepic
!). Because if someone has a question about an existing answer he can ask and get a clarification. And that's why I also think, particularly when the question is asked by a clear beginner, that we should make the extra effort to be more friendly and educate the people who will be later also asking and answering the questions of this site.
Edit: Just to clarify, I'm not suggesting that we should babysit new LaTeX users, neither we should tolerate lazy users who can't botter to read or follow instructions. Probably all that we need to provide is just enough information that an unexperienced but diligent user could use in order to figure out the way by themselves.