Should we allow highly open-ended questions like "do any languages have feature X"?

Question

Some examples off the top of my head:

• Are there any languages without fricatives?
• What language has the most points of stop consonant articulation?
• Are there any languages without at least a first-person second-person third-person distinction?
• Are there any pragmatic phenomena that differ between languages in a way that cannot be attributed to culture/society?

All of these questions conceivably have solid (albeit disputable) answers, but there's a risk that the open-ended format will result in unfocused and ultimately messy discussion.

A potential pro I see in these sorts of questions is that they would be very interesting to me (and I suspect other community members). Moreover, I would propose that these questions are also fairly "Google"-able, so having them on the site may improve our profile.

I've seen other StackExchange communities go both ways. For instance, the Programmers site rarely closes a question for lack of specificity. On the other hand, the vanilla StackOverflow seems to at least have a tepid response for "best practices" questions and the like.

Some potential responses:

• Delete all such questions
• Enforce community wiki status to prevent too much attention being diverted to these sorts of questions while still welcoming contributions
• Permit all such questions

Answer 1

Yes, they should stand because a WALS query isn't slam dunk with respect to determining that something doesn't exist (and may not be a slam dunk with respect that a feature does exist, because WALS is counting very specific features in some cases).

I think the phenomena of a stack exchange site slowing copying data from other famous information repositories (WALS, wikipedia) is probably unavoidable.

To put a positive spin on it, friends should send friends to the Linguistics SE, not WALS.

Answer 2

I think that the four examples are very different:

Question 1 and 3 are precise questions with some likelihood that an answer might turn up if it exists.

Question 2 necessarily assumes that the answerers knows all languages, so I have doubts about the formulation.

And Question 4 seems to be at least exremely vague.

So, personally, I am very much in favour of 1 and 3, and I don't see a reason to discourage 2 and 4 if they attract reasonable answers. Question 2 very likely would, for question 4 I cannot tell.

Basically, the answerers can weaken quantifiers in their answers, so they won't give the most fluffy language, but instead a very fluffy language.