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This question is motivated by this suggestion of moderator 'Flimzy':

[Source:] I have wondered at times if our "no resource requests" policy is a bit too hard-lined, so I, for one, would welcome a revisit to the topic.

To reason by analogy, I ought to emphasise that both French and Linguistics SE permit questions about resources and recommendations.

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    You should rather tell us why does french and linguistics SE permit list questions about resources and recommendations? What are the arguments for them?
    – Jose Luis
    Commented Nov 26, 2015 at 8:41
  • I completely agree with @Joze. When I suggested that you bring this up on meta, I specifically suggested providing your justification for such a change. Can you (and anyone else) explain why it should be changed?
    – Flimzy
    Commented Dec 14, 2015 at 11:44

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As much as I would love to improve this site and make it a better resource by relaxing some of our policies, I fail to see how this particular change would work.

To start with, I agree with @jose that before doing so just because other stack allows it, we should understand why they do it and how they do it to do it correctly and how it adds value to the site.

Second, I think these would be very biased or opinion based questions (so even if we relax our policies we would still need to have something in place). As you can see in the meta question you are referencing these questions about resources usually are

open-ended, effectively asking for a list of books that meet a criteria.

And what is a good resource for me could not be a good learning resource for you. Maybe the way it is explained in a book makes it easier for me to understand, but not necessarily for you.

I have had the same experience myself as an English learner, looking for example for a complete/exhaustive list of phrasal verbs or irregular verbs or handy travel dictionaries. I actually have had similar problems for other disciplines. Let's say that I went to Stack Overflow and asked for a "good book to learn Java". Probably there's dozens, just for beginners. The answer could also depend on if I'm new to coding or not (like, do you want to learn Java coming from JavaScript, or C, or C++ or from scratch).

So, I don't think that is enough with saying "now on, we admit questions about resources". Actually, to answer your original question Should the prohibition on questions on resources be changed? I would say: "Changed to what, specifically", and then see if that makes sense to a site that encourages Q+A, discourages opinion based answers (or at least answers that are not properly backed up with a certain degree of logic) and dislikes questions that are "too broad".

So please, don't take this as a "no, and stop asking". This is more a

please, propose something. Explain how these other stacks do it, how we could do it here and how it would add value. Don't say "let's change it" but "let's change it to this (or that). Be specific.

And then probably it could be voted as new functionality, to see if the community actually wants to move to that idea (or change it a little) or doesn't think it would actually add value.

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