Should stress marks be encouraged?

Question

Should we explicitly encourage the use of stress marks on Russian Language and Usage?

Russian language learners would greatly benefit if examples in questions and answers had stress position indicated with the standard stress mark. Ex.:

Ско́лько сто́ит рабо́та пли́точника в Москве́?

This is similar to the inclusion of furigana which seems to be getting more and more common at Japanese Language and Usage

Answer 1

Encourage not enforce

I guess we should. It can be quite useful to the learners of the language, who are the target audience. In this case, the examples ought better contain the stress marks.

On the other hand, marking stresses is very tedious. Not every piece of Russian text should be marked: quotes, for example, should probably not be unless they are supposed to be the reading material.

Some higher-level questions asked by people with advanced level of Russian probably don't necessarily require this in the answers. Maybe we can introduce some kind of a tag to mark either case?

Also, we probably need some kind of a button above the edit box to quickly enter the combining acute accent (though you can use this keyboard layout, which has it bound to AltGr+Shift+/ — quite handy).

Answer 2

I don't think we should force users to do it. If you want to add it to an existing answer, ok, but it's very tedious to do it.

Furigana is something strictly "included" in the Japanese language. In Russian you don't see marks. Actually, I've even seen the ë being written as e as well, because people good at Russian or natives already know if it's one or another.

In any case, I don't want to forbid anyone to use them, I simply think that "forcing" people to do it might be quite "long" and not that productive. :)

By the way, I'd strongly advise to avoid using tags in this sense. Tags are about the content, the subject, not the question itself. That's why we don't use tags like simple-question. They are Meta-tags.

Answer 3

I believe stresses should be marked only where the question is about the stress. Marking can be done, as usual, with an italic or bold font, or with an accent. Overdoing stress marking impedes readability, since in usual written Russian it is traditionally used to emphasize some words in the sentence.