@Wesley, MDMarra - could you give an example of an intermediate question? this is not so much for the discussion as for my own perspective. I think MDMarra nailed it when he said that perspective may be part of the problem. what I call intermediate you may call beginner, and what I call beginner you may call "doesn't even register". it may be that even if there aren't less doesn't-even-register questions on the site, it would feel better if the signal-to-noise ratio was better. in that case, s/intermediate/beginner/ and the answer still applies. maybe?

@MDMarra hmm, okay. I think that's an interesting point. the way I would define beginning would be "barely knows how to use a commandline, has at most a rough understanding of how to use e.g. dpkg, ping and other basic tools", I'd define intermediate as "knows to document things, knows to think about tools like etckeeper or maybe Puppet, can handle dpkg with ease, etc.", and I'd define advanced as "eats database corruption, RAID failures, mysteriously dropped packets, OpenStack-type clustering, etc. for breakfast" - I'm assuming this doesn't match your definition?

@Iain shrugs...

I gotta say that when I first saw this title, I assumed you were talking about the Unicode (ab)use post...

if they had read the documentation, we shouldn't have to assume this. OP should have mentioned that they had done so in their question.

If so, why is there a best-practices tag? (Thanks, though, it does make sense.)