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I was going to create a new tag, "aprendizaje" or "principiante" but then I discovered we already have , whose definition instructs people not to use it!

I don't have the rep to redefine it by myself but have proposed a redefinition which will get reviewed.

This post is in a way redundant but I wanted to explain my idea and give the opportunity for discussion.

Reason for proposal: our site is a hybrid, a composite of two different sites -- native speakers who find something interesting or intriguing to ask about; and students of Spanish with specific questions about grammar, usage, etc.

This is analogous to questions on Meta often being tagged as "discussion" or "support."

One of the benefits I'm imagining for tagging learner questions somehow is that Spanish language learners will be able to browse other "learner" questions. This will make our site more useful to learners and will help our site grow. If we can expand our learner user base, that will make the site bigger overall, and size will help us attract native speakers too. Kind of like how capital begets more capital.

Note that I originally proposed this tag concept in There is no sister site here, similar to ELL for ELU; hence some proposals:

  1. We might need some additional tags, I'm not sure, since I''m not very familiar with our tag repertoire. Maybe pedagogía or principiante? Which could be added to questions that cover basic questions posed by Spanish learners?
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    I find it a bit difficult to think of a question or answer on the main site from which I could not learn something so some variant on beginner might be better than learning to cover what you intend.
    – mdewey
    Feb 5, 2018 at 12:35
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    There could be a benefit on having a tag that says "do not use me". If we have come across the problem of people making the same mistake over and over probably is better to leave a tag with a warning than deleting it each time it gets created. I disagree about tagging "learner" questions with it, but maybe it can be reused for better targeted questions about learning, such as: "At which age should a kid learnt to use subjuntive?", "how do kids learn to write/read in Spanish (what is the process)?" etc. Community will need to discuss if that is a usage (a type of question) we want/need to have
    – Diego
    Feb 5, 2018 at 14:23

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I think this is a very good idea, and it is a problem that hasn't been addressed in StackOverflow (with the closing and duplicate flagging zeal we see there). There are many questions there that are done by people that are learning and that don't have such a high skill level.

It would be useful for us to have a new tag, probably not but maybe ? This would allow those that want to answer questions by learners to find them quickly, and for learners to find questions other learners have made in an easy manner.

Of course if it is a mistake that is done over and over again, we would still have no tolerance for duplicates, after all there aren't new versions of spanish all the time to make previous questions or answers obsolete.

I think adding one of those tags wouldn't add too much overhead to the site and would be useful for some people, of course making the description as clear as possible will be critical.

Let's see what others think about this.

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  • ¿How about novato / novice? For principiante or aprendiz the English synonym tag could be learner. I think I'm leaning toward learner / principiante. I'm thinking "principiante" would be more accessible to that sector of the community than "aprendiz". "Aprendiz" is a great word but I'm not sure how many learners would be familiar with it. Feb 7, 2018 at 13:26
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    I disagree about a "principiante" tag, since it could be unclear to determine when a question is a "principiante level" question. That would be a subjective assessment that could cause a lot of tagging and re-tagging (as opposed to other tags, which are like "this is a question about subjuntivo, or preposition or solicitud de término"). I may look for (preexisting) questions tagged "subjuntivo" if I have a question about subjuntivo, but I don't really see the use case for querying questions tagged "principiante".
    – Diego
    Feb 11, 2018 at 17:04
  • @Diego - Thanks, I wasn't super comfortable with "principiante" either. But I'm not sure what else to propose. I think "learner" nails it but I'm having trouble finding a precise equivalent. Feb 11, 2018 at 18:16
  • @Diego Yes true that I didn't consider that. I think there are general parameters that we can consider for novice profiles, such as grammar questions. It is though for a bigger discussion IF we do it in the first place.
    – Jose Luis
    Feb 12, 2018 at 12:25
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I am against this...

As mdewey commented:

I find it a bit difficult to think of a question or answer on the main site from which I could not learn something so some variant on beginner might be better than learning to cover what you intend.

And would become a perfect case of Meta tags, which is something that Stack Overflow addressed so long ago: The Death of Meta Tags.

I think it is a great idea to curate questions so that they are useful for people learning Spanish. However, using a tag would not help much: what levels should it cover? Would it be just canonical questions or all of them? Who is in charge of deciding which ones are the good ones?

... but we can do better

We have resources for this purpose: let's use wiki pages! Following what is discussed in ¿Qué preguntas canónicas tenemos? What are the canonical answers we've discovered over the years? (which is also used in ELL, for example in Canonical Post #2: What is the perfect, and how should I use it?) and ideas like Nominaciones a la mejor respuesta / Best answer nominations (2017 Q4), we can very much highlight good answers. The next step is marking them and putting the info in the wiki page.

For example, I am a big fan of the Bash tag wiki in Stack Overflow. In there you can find a lot of information, with sections such as:

  • Basic Syntax and Common Newbie Problems
  • How Do I ...?
  • Why Does ...?
  • ...

So we can curate a list of sections on the most important tags and indicate some good answers for some given levels.

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