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For instance: “Rashi wrote a commentary on the Torah, but I don’t speak Hebrew and old French. Does anyone have an English translation?” And a valid answer would be a link to Sefaria, or Artscroll’s translation.

Is such a question on-topic? It satisfies Judaism not Jews, but do we want such questions flooding our site?

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    Personally, it's very rare that I'll upvote a product-recommendation question. But that doesn't mean they're off-topic, which is your first question. Re flooding (your second question), cf. judaism.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3846. – msh210♦ Jul 18 '18 at 18:57
  • Regardless of on-topicness, a question like your Rashi example can be answered in under 5 seconds with a simple Google search, and therefore might be considered as "not showing any research effort". – Alex Jul 18 '18 at 20:05
  • @Alex The specific questions I have in mind are a bit more complex than that. I just used Rashi as an easy example to illustrate the kind of questions I am talking about. – DonielF Jul 18 '18 at 20:14
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Asking for the existence of a particular Judaism book is about Judaism and therefore certainly on-topic.

This is, sort of, a special case of asking for the existence of X within Judaism, which is discussed in this previous Meta post. The community consensus seems to be currently that such questions are fine even without clear motivation, though motivation would be good to include. In this case, if the question explains that there's a version of this book in language X but the asker would like to study it in language Y, that sounds like a pretty good motivation to me.

That said, if a user were to, say, take a list of commentaries on the Talmud and methodically post one trivial question for each one asking if it exists in English, flooding the front page with such questions, that could be something the moderators would ask the user to stop or at least rate-limit, so as not to abuse the front page.

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  • Perhaps there should be one question asking for a list of Jewish books that have English translations, and we can have a community wiki answer where everyone can add whatever books they are aware of? Then anytime someone asks about a specific book they can be directed to the post that has the complete list. – Alex Jul 18 '18 at 19:55
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    @Alex I would close such a question as Too Broad in a heartbeat. – Isaac Moses♦ Jul 18 '18 at 19:55
  • Well then it's a good thing I suggested it here before spending a lot of time on such a post. – Alex Jul 18 '18 at 19:57
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    @Alex Yes. :) Anyway, I checked with the Department of Mi Yodeya Security and learned that the current Threat Level for a book-translation-question flood attack is "White: No Current Threat," but don't worry; should such an attack come, we'll rapidly muster our forces to handle it. – Isaac Moses♦ Jul 18 '18 at 19:59

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