Welcome to Codidact Meta!
Codidact Meta is the meta-discussion site for the Codidact community network and the Codidact software. Whether you have bug reports or feature requests, support questions or rule discussions that touch the whole network – this is the site for you.
Comments on Is it okay to ask a question because you're too lazy/bored to figure it out yourself?
Parent
Is it okay to ask a question because you're too lazy/bored to figure it out yourself?
It is generally considered good practice to try and do your own research to find the answer to a question before you post it.
There are some questions where the asker is just not capable of finding the answer on their own, no matter how much research they do on their own. As a contrived example, let's say that color of traffic lights in Elbonia is not documented anywhere, and Elbonia has currently closed all borders. A person wondering what color the traffic lights are in Elbonia cannot find it no matter what they do. Their only hope is to ask here, and perhaps a kind Elbonian will volunteer the facts.
A second class is questions where the asker could in theory figure it out, but it would be very burdensome. For example, perhaps the answer requires advanced degrees and a decades of reading literature, whereas the asker is an illiterate child. If the asker tried to answer it their own, they would have to dedicate a lifetime to it, and might easily still fail.
Then we have the spectrum going all the way down to questions where the answer could be easily found with "a basic 5 second google", or even questions where the answer is obvious by simply reading the question back.
I'm asking about questions where:
- The answer is readily available and can be found with "a 5 second google"
- The asker knows that it is readily available
- A quick skim of these answer(s) elsewhere would immediately tell you exactly what the answer is, if you are proficient in the subject matter
- The asker is not proficient, and finds the material hard to understand or difficult to read. Perhaps they have spent some reasonable, short amount of time trying to read it (like 30 minutes), failed to comprehend it, and decided that figuring it out would likely take considerable effort (hours or days). Besides mere effort, the asker may also find the material too boring to attempt to get through (don't laugh - people ask sometimes about laws and standards!).
The asker is basically asking the community to summarize/ELI5 a topic, because they themselves feel like it would be too much work to go through it.
- Is it generally discouraged to ask questions on Codidact if an answer can be found elsewhere on the internet or in a book?
- Is there some minimum level of effort the asker must make, and if so, what is it?
- Is it bad to "use the community as a resource" in this way?
I specifically draw the line at minutes vs. hours because I think this is the useful place to draw it in practice. Asking a question already takes a few minutes, so it is a natural baseline for measuring effort.
I want to question the premise of this question. In the title, you wrote: > Is it okay to ask a question because y …
7mo ago
Give a man a fish, and he'll eat for a day. Then tomorrow, he'll ask for another fish. And you give it to him then too, …
7mo ago
Regarding the "5 second google" part: We did discuss this very thing at some point over at Software Development Quest …
7mo ago
Users vs. questions Personally, I don't care much, if at all, about the motivation behind a question - as long as it …
7mo ago
My answers would be that: It's okay to ask here even if the answer is readily available elsewhere There is no mini …
7mo ago
Post
Regarding the "5 second google" part:
We did discuss this very thing at some point over at Software Development Questions easily answered by studying a beginner-level book. There were lots of diverse opinions and no consensus, with votes and arguments all over the place. Bit of a touchy topic.
Without repeating all arguments made there - what can at least be said is that some people will find poorly researched/very basic questions offensive. As the infamous "treating the Q&A site as an interactive beginner tutorial" example mentioned in that question.
It isn't as easy to dismiss this concern with "you don't have to answer it if you don't want to", because if a question, no matter its nature, is considered low quality by many, then it ends up as "clutter": it distracts from and competes with potentially/arguably higher quality content on the same site.
In addition to the "clutter the site with potentially/arguably low-quality content" argument, we should probably encourage at least some research effort just to avoid all the drama that comes with these kind of questions. Peace of mind and low moderator stress are good things.
Regarding how much research effort we can reasonably expect:
...that's also tricky. On several occasions I have started to write a question, but while I did realized that - "hey, if I read this paper here that I found while searching the web, I can probably find out myself". And then I deleted the question to go and find the answer. For example, Wikipedia is most often a pretty good and trusted source these days.
For Codidact specifically this isn't ideal though, because most sites could really do with some extra activity. It doesn't hurt to ask and go research the answer yourself at the same time. Or even better, ask it and answer it yourself, then see what other answers that pop up. Maybe they are more in-depth, maybe they bring up things you had not even considered etc.
If we only ask questions in situations where we truly can't find the answer even after extensive research, then it kind of defeats the purpose of Q&A sites, namely to get a quick reply from someone with extensive experience of the topic.
Like for example, before Stack Overflow was launched: if I had some detailed question about some niche programming thing deep inside the Windows API, then I should be so lucky if I could find information or examples about it online, let alone find someone on a traditional forum that could answer it with some confidence and credibility. But on SO I could get an answer from someone deeply involved in this niche thing, perhaps working with it all day long.
The success factor is definitely a "strength in numbers" situation - the larger the user base and the existing Q&A pool gets, the more likely you are to find answers.
And also at the same time, we may have actual domain experts lurking below diverse topics in the various communities, that can give you a far more in-depth answer than some wikipedia page or online tutorial. If we trigger these people to write answers, we don't just end up with volume but also quality. Which in turns draw more experts on that topic since they might have found the post curious. If you never post the question that triggered such answers, then none of it will happen.
0 comment threads