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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 …
1y 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, …
1y ago
Regarding the "5 second google" part: We did discuss this very thing at some point over at Software Development Quest …
1y ago
Users vs. questions Personally, I don't care much, if at all, about the motivation behind a question - as long as it …
1y ago
My answers would be that: It's okay to ask here even if the answer is readily available elsewhere There is no mini …
1y ago
5 answers
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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.
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, so he comes back the next day. And the next. And at some point it's no longer fun for you to give him fish, so you don't, but someone else does. And other people see that this is where the fish are given away, so they congregate here with their fish requests, and meanwhile everyone who actually respects their time and wants to do something to help these fishless souls that's less ephemeral finds that their fishing dojo has been overrun with fish-flingers and their hungry clients.
There are so many places on the internet where help vampires can beg for help and empathetic marks can feed them. The value of a Q&A site, as distinct from a Reddit or a Discord or a Facebook group, is putting in the extra effort to build a resource that is valuable for more than one person at a time. Both askers and answerers should buy into this mission, or they're not doing Q&A; they're doing help forum.
Expecting askers to do some research before posting a question is a vital part of how they demonstrate that they buy into this mission. We should not encourage lazy askers because they lead to degrading a Q&A site into a copy of r/eli5. If you want r/eli5, go to r/eli5, and spend all your days there. This place should be different.
As for where the line for ‘minimum effort’ should be drawn, I expect that to be decided on a community-by-community basis. But I think drawing it all the way at ‘no effort required’ means you're surrendering the fundamental thing that makes Q&A sites a good idea.
I want to question the premise of this question.
In the title, you wrote:
Is it okay to ask a question because you're too lazy/bored to figure it out yourself?
but in the question body, you wrote among else:
- 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!).
I would say that not being able to understand something pertinent which you've found trying to find an answer, and asking for help in clarifying that, is entirely acceptable.
That's not being lazy.
However, the question you ask should show that you have put in some effort yourself before asking of others, and in order to avoid the XY problem should preferably also state something close to the ultimate goal.
Not only does this help avoid duplicate effort, it also shows that you respect other peoples' time by at least trying for yourself first.
In your example of Elbonian traffic lights, an asker might plausibly write something along the lines of:
For a fiction story I'm writing which is in part set in present-day Elbonia, I really need to get the traffic light colors right. I checked the Elbonian Road Transportation Authority's web site (link), but found nothing browsing it or doing Google searches for "traffic light" restricted to it. This was especially difficult because the site seems to be available only in the Elbonian language which I can't read, so I had to rely on online translation services. I then checked Wikipedia, but the "list of traffic light colors internationally" article (link) lists several neighboring countries but not Elbonia, and the neighboring countries all seem to use different colors so not even that helped. I then tried a broader search but everything I found was about how to cope if you are a color-blind tourist visiting Elbonia; examples: link link link link. I desperation I asked the Tach Drab Elgoog AI search engine, but it gave back different answers every time. The borders are closed so I can't even travel there myself. What color lights are used for Elbonian traffic lights, and what is the meaning of each color used? Photos appreciated.
This would clearly show that the asker has tried and failed to find the answer before asking for free help of others. Also, the question is bounded and specific; the set of possible answers is limited, and each answer can be judged by a subject matter expert on its correctness and on how well it addresses the question.
If on the other hand the material is available but difficult to understand -- say, because it's highly specialized and about all there is about the subject is in scientific journals intended for other scientists in the field, and the person asking is a high school student -- then again this can be pointed out. Another example:
I'm trying to learn about frobnication of thromblemeisters for a 11th grade science fair school project, and everything I find says that "quantum frobnication" is really really important but nothing about why that is the case. I've found lots of scientific articles which seem to discuss the submolecular properties of the quantum frobnication process, but beyond recognizing that this is what they are about those go totally over my head; examples are link, link and link. The physics teachers at my school were unable to help. Just why is the quantum frobnication so important, and what would happen if one did a classical/non-quantum frobnication instead?
Again, this shows that the person asking the question has tried (and what they have tried) but failed in their efforts to find an answer on their own. And also again, the question is bounded and specific. The reference to "11th grade science fair school project" establishes the likely proficiency level of the asker, helping guide the style of potential answers.
Both of those make perfectly valid, very much not lazy or bored, questions to be posed on an appropriate community.
Users vs. questions
Personally, I don't care much, if at all, about the motivation behind a question - as long as it isn't a thinly veiled rant or other sort of soapboxing (i.e. is genuinely a question). On Stack Overflow meta I would say that questions are 100% about the questions in themselves and 0% about the people asking them. Of course, here we're explicitly looking for a "community"-oriented approach, but honestly I think that doesn't make a huge difference.
There is value in trying to "onboard" people and get them used to community norms etc. so they can ask better questions, but any site that gets large enough will eventually accumulate a long tail of people who have zero-to-minimal interest in long-term engagement. Expecting a "minimal level of effort" is helpful insofar as it deters "help vampires" from repeatedly asking bad questions. But many people who ask a lazy question won't come back anyway, no matter how we treat the question (and even if it's the uncommon "lazy but good" question). It's not possible to predict in advance who the help vampires will be.
Different types of "lack of effort"
If the answer is found "with a 5 second [web search]", ideally that would be a web search that leads to an existing Codidact question - that would be evidence of Codidact taking over as the go-to Q&A site, and what loftier goal could a Q&A site have? As I said on Software meta (which I also linked on your other question about "clutter", and from the other Software meta question that Lundin linked): we can keep Codidact DRY, but we can't keep the Internet DRY. If we want to grow Codidact communities then we must host information that is found in some form elsewhere on the Internet, even in easily found places. If we do not, then people have no reason to come here for information. Simple as that.
If the answer is found "by reading the question title back", then that is simply not a good question. Rubber ducks are only useful to their owners. Such questions should be promptly removed, if there is no evidence of a common underlying question (e.g. about a common misconception or gotcha).
If someone "finds the material hard to understand or difficult to read", then that is exactly the place where a Q&A site can add value. It would be absurd to turn away such questions, as they are the very lifeblood of Q&A sites and the reason for their existence. Documentation often provides all the necessary information but fails to answer the underlying question.
For example, documentation commonly lists what each tool in a collection does, but in order to figure out the right tool for your task, you need to reverse that mapping. In the best case, the combination of documentation and web search solves the problem. But often you need to search again within a candidate page, and then you might discover that it's the wrong documentation page and have to try again. Or maybe you don't conceptualize the task in the same way that the documentation does, and therefore can't craft an effective search for the task description, and don't find the tool.
Then again, sometimes someone has already found documentation, and then is confused by what is written there. In a lot of these cases, this process is actually irrelevant background noise - the confusion has resulted in a new question that is independent of the task that motivated the search for documentation. This situation doesn't represent zero effort, but it often represents less effort than we'd like. What I propose is that the lack of effort isn't a problem in itself, but it can be a problem because of the effect on the question phrasing. Such questions should be edited to reflect what they're actually about.
Relatedly, sometimes in computing contexts, people get an error message and just freeze up at that point. It's important to be able to point people at reference material for understanding and diagnosing such error messages, even if we aren't interested in fixing a specific user's issue. Even something as simple (please pardon the specific, programming-related example) as "A TypeError is an Error that happened because something has the wrong Type" is worthy of elaboration: the very underlying concept of "type" may need explanation, and there are many potential approaches to resolving the problem that need to be carefully considered (Which thing has the wrong type? What should the type(s) be instead, and why? Can the type be converted straightforwardly? What should be the semantics of such a conversion? Is the proximate cause of the problem also the ultimate cause, or was there some other code earlier that produced an intermediate result with the wrong type?).
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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).
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