My answers would be that:

• It's okay to ask here even if the answer is readily available elsewhere
• There is no minimum level of research, beyond ensuring it's clear what's being asked
• It is not bad to use the community as a resource, that is what the community exists for

Of course this is just my take. I don't claim to speak for the community. I do sometimes ask such questions, but I don't want this to be seen as an attempt to carve out an exception for myself. If the community ends up deciding that such questions are not okay, that's fine (although, as a member of the community, I would dissent). I'll attempt to write from the perspective of answerer or lurker only.

I have never encountered a situation where the same question returned search hits from both Codidact (or Stack sites) and other sources, and I wished it didn't. I have heard rumors that sometimes a low quality Stack question with no real answer becomes a top hit, itself impeding attempts to find a good answer, but never personally experienced it. I have seen cases where the top Google result is a Stack question with commenters berating the asker about how if they had only Googled it, the answer would have been a top result. When a specific question is answered directly on both a QA site like here or on Stack, and some other resource, I almost always prefer the QA site because it is usually higher quality, niftier (built in comparison of alternate answers, indicators of being up to date, ability to ask for clarification), more focused and much faster to consume (thus less of a detour). I'm shameless about being a "StackOverflow programmer" and encourage others to do so.

I don't mind answering such questions either. Sometimes I enjoy it, because even though the answer is obvious, it's fun to see how well you can phrase it. It's kind of like code golf but for answers. I personally believe brevity is the soul of wit, as well as quality answers, so ideally an answer should be <4 paragraphs, which doesn't take that long to type. Sometimes I don't enjoy it, but don't hate it either, so I answer anyway and call it my good deed for the day. Sometimes I feel like answering such a basic question would be a chore, so I simply don't answer and ignore the question.

It never sat right with me to see people complain such questions:

• What's obvious to an expert is not obvious to a lay person or newbie.
• The time differential can be considerable - you can spend hours or days going in circles in an unfamiliar topic, while an expert would know the answer immediately.
• Search engines tend to be much more cooperative if you already know what sort of result you are looking for.
• A lot of reference material elsewhere is just not well structured. If you are trying to skim through a long text to answer the one point, you often find that the text is really not written in a way that's conducive to it. Many (not all) experts also seem to engage in obscurantism, perhaps to fortify the value of their expertise.
• Not everyone has the same appetite for learning every subject, sometimes you just want to get a quick answer and otherwise avoid the topic. It doesn't seem fair to restrict knowledge to only those who are passionate about a domain - should only lawyers know what the law says?
• Saving other people time seems to me a noble goal with strong precedent in areas such as the open source software movement. Asking such questions is conducive to this goal.

There's a line of thought that it's unfair to expect volunteers to do the work for you when you can't be bothered yourself. But besides the appeal of work being subjective, as a volunteer here I am free to stop volunteering and start again whenever I like, and I have almost full control of the nature of my volunteer work, so I don't see much pretext for demanding that askers respect my personal preferences.

Another objection could be that such basic questions are not interesting to experts. I don't personally feel that true experts should be the focus of site policy, however. In my experience with top experts, they often don't have the time nor interest in online discussion communities like QA sites. For example, most answerers of StackOverflow are programmers of middling skill, not the top talents of our time (with a handful of exceptions). Such semi-experts can serve a valuable function of bridging the gap between inaccessible expert material and average members of the public, and I think this is the most interesting user segment for a QA site. Also, top experts themselves are often interested in outreach to people of very low expertise, rather those who are slightly less expert than themselves (perhaps because experts have their own professional venues where they already satisfy their need to interact with people of similar expertise).

posted about 1 year ago

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matthewsnyder‭

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