How much detail do we want in our questions?

Question

There are some questions with little specifics:

The question is being used, as it is an easy example:

How would I deal with a choking cat?

• I am a little uneasy about questions being allowed that are too broad, is there future more specific questions are at risk of becoming duplicates.

Eg: If my cat has been eating [cooked chicken bones] or [dry food]
I came into the room and the cat was choking, I didn't see if he'd been eating

• If so, how do we handle duplication?

• The other issue is, are the questions generic.

The issue with a pet site is we are dealing with potential dangers. Dogs breed and size, snake type, etc a few examples of details we need to answer questions well.

What age of snake is best for a pet?

This question appears to be off-topic because it does not give enough detail to give a good answer, given that snakes are a specialised pet and potentially dangerous, I am reluctant to answer this without details of the snake type you are referring to

Do we want such generic questions?

Answer 1

Questions that are too generic are of limited usefulness; in an attempt to answer a vague, what-if scenario with no concrete information, all we can do is write vague, speculative answers. That's already easy to find; we will not make the Internet a better place by hosting such questions.

In addition, I suspect they will drive away the experts we seek, a problem I've seen on other sites.

There's a reason that the standard close reasons include "too broad" and "unclear what you're asking".

Answer 2

Actually the amount of content in a question does not really matter. The question should have all of the following:

• A clear, specific explanation
• A narrow enough subject to answer (not too broad), but not too narrow to not be useful
• Well formatted
• Any details that help the question have the above 3.

So a question may have 3 lines, or 3 paragraphs, it all goes down to whether your question is useful and clear.