Post History

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](https://software.codidact.com/posts/284979). 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.

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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.