Is asking in English actually encouraged? A criterion

Question

I guess for the majority of non-native German speakers it's easier to ask in English. However I see some people – whose mother tongue is German presumably – asking in English.

• Is asking in English actually encouraged?

As for me, the criterion I use is: I try to ask in English only if it is very difficult to write the idea in German or if the question is intrinsically German (no translation involved). I guess every body has the freedom of language choice here. But is there a useful criterion to decide?

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Side note: This is the only site in (Languages).SE where the tags are in English.

Answer 1

As from the previous Meta posts on this topic we came to the conclusion that we simply allow both, German, and English questions:

• What language should the questions be written in?
• What language should be preferred for questions?

There are no criteria or rules as when to ask in German, or when to ask in English. Any poster is free to choose whichever they prefer, or they believe addresses the intended audience better. We should also think about which question language will be easier to be found on queries from search engines to have enough traffic coming in.

Tags are a bit different. We were the first non-English site here on the network when the discussion about tag language came up:

• Which language should tags be in?

Again, we came to the conclusion that it may be better to not have multi-lingual tags but tags in one language only. Choosing English (and synonymizing German tags) was a matter of simplicity rather than reason.

Now that we have English tags it would lead to an immense effort to translate & re-synonymize all these tags and their wikis to German with to my opinion little value to the site. In addition we would need a switch to Unicode tags to properly render ß and umlauts.