I will begin by jumping ahead to my bottom line proposal:
When we find ourselves in a gray zone between what is nice and what is not nice, let us take into account the relative newness of the participant.
Now the lead-in that I skipped over:
New participants sometimes take a little while to figure out how things work here. That's understandable. It took me awhile, and there were some hurt feelings along the way (that was prior to discovering Spanish Language SE). Of course, a StackEchange community should never let a specific user blackmail it into relaxing the rules and customs for that user alone, and I'm not suggesting that we relax the norms of what is a properly formed question or answer for this user in particular, or even for new participants in general. As an example of the general principle I'm proposing, here is a comment to a relatively new participant's answer that I think will help me illustrate what I'm getting at:
No respondes a la pregunta. Por favor procura adaptar la respuesta a lo que está preguntando OP, en vez de copiar y pegar a ciegas sin aportar nada más. | (You are not responding to the question. Please try to adapt the answer to what OP is asking, instead of blindly copying and pasting without adding anything else.)
(I'm quoting the text of the comment here because I have flagged it and it might be quietly removed.)
I understand the desire to keep to certain standards. We want to guide new participants to write well-constructed answers. This means upvoting when they get it right, downvoting when they don't, and giving constructive guidance in comments below the answer, that the new participants can learn from.
I'm requesting that we consider how the recipient will feel when reading the guidance we give.
Imagine that you are a participant who's been on the site for one month, who starts out with a style that values intuition over documentation, and a down-to-earth style over meticulousness in syntax and spelling, but who makes a sincere effort to adapt to the site culture. I can understand an experienced participant feeling vexed about sloppy answers, but let's be more careful about what we say to new participants.
Let's continue to guide new arrivals with feedback showing the reasons behind our votes, but let's phrase our feedback with more empathy and consideration for how long someone has been here. One month, my friends, is a very short time.
