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We expect questions to indicate prior research, but it seems to be the policy to not close questions even though the answer can be found on Google.

Should we expect posters to research their question on standard reference sites like Wikipedia?
For example these recent questions are immediately answerable by a quick Wikipedia search:
- Herkunft von »bis in die Puppen«,
- What does »Gettofäuste verteilen« mean?.

Should questions like these be closed?

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I strongly vote against closing questions that may have an answer in the German or English Wikipedia for the following reasons:

  • Wikipedia is not a dictionary
  • Wikipedia is not a language-related site
  • therefore finding answers to language question on Wikipedia is not so easy.
  • for language questions we are much better, but we can make good use of references to Wikipedia articles.
  • results from other encyclopedias are rarely considered to be general reference, why?
  • I doubt that questions that can be answered from Wikipedia articles will affect the overall quality of our site negatively.

And last not least but important:

  • we have much too few questions here. There is no urgent need for introducing new restrictions.

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