Many questions are about how to effectively learn a language. Some of them are voted for closing, since they are too opinion based.
Should this site be entirely based on studies, or should a level of experience and opinions be involved? I personally see value in opinion questions, since there are no right answers to a lot of these questions and even opinions can be helpful.
We are not a science site so not answers don't need to cite sources. studies may request answers to cite sources but that's pretty much where the citing ends.
The close reason primarily-opinion-based doesn't discriminate all subjective questions. Key word: primary.
Some examples of opinion-based questions are:
(these are exaggerated examples)
As you can see all these answers are opinion based. If I give you an answer, it will be what I think is the best answer.
Attempts to cover up opinion-based questions
If I change the question to:
Well... that can be considered objective but the question is truly opinion based and this is really just a cover-up. What is "scientific research? A poll?
These are especially bad for the site's health as they result in unanswered questions (because chances are the study has not been done), and low quality content.
*What's wrong with opinion based?
Stack Exchange is a Q&A forums, for answers not opinions. Opinion-based questions bring forth low-quality content such as "Why is English the worst language?".
As I said earlier, the only very objective questions are probably going to be going to be studies. Good subjective isn't opinion based, meaning answers aren't simply a binary preference and bias is minimal. Examples are:
these are both subjective, as their is no cut and dry "way" to do, but they are the good type of subjective.
If you have disagreements or questions about what I said please leave a comment or ping me (@Downgoat) in chat.
I think this is a lot harder on a site like this than on most other SEs - on something like Stack Overflow, a question can be clearly objective - an answer will either work or it won't, but with language learning, a lot of techniques will vary from person to person (and probably from language to language) in their effectiveness.
Therefore I think we will get a lot more subjective questions here than on many other SEs, so should be more careful about closing questions for being opinion-based.
