Should a minimal effort to find the answer be required for a question?

Question

See this exchange in the comments, about closing the question.

I would like to see, as a possible reason to close a question, a judgment as to whether the OP made a minimal effort to find the answer.

I think that a question should mention what research the OP undertook to try to find the answer, before asking here.

This judgment is relative to the question and the perceived knowledge level of the user, of course. A user who seems to know the basics of how to get around in Lisp or Emacs should be expected to make a minimal effort to ask Emacs (e.g. C-h f or C-h v), IMO.

A complete newbie would not be expected to know how to ask Emacs in even a basic way. The bar could be much lower for an obvious newbie.

But the page about how to pose questions here could also mention some basics about how to ask Emacs - that would be helpful, I think. There is no shame in ignorance, and obviously, all levels of Emacs users are welcome to pose all kinds of question.

But I do think that a lack of specifying in the question just what the OP has tried should be grounds for voting to close. This is similar to what is done on StackOverflow and english.stackexchange.com. And to me, it constitutes part of asking a good question.

This is about adding this as a reason to close. That's all. Closure requires judgment and votes by multiple people.

Just one opinion.

Answer 1

Oh, it's the discussions like this that made me unregister from StackOverflow flagship site. Come on people, sorry for the rough language, but don't be anal about it. I've been a moderator for several years at another programming forum, and I believe that questions like the one being discussed have their own merits: they provide an opportunity for people with less extensive knowledge of the subject to answer.

I really dislike the idea of punishing for not seeing / displaying enough research by preventing answers to the question. The site as a whole benefits from answering basic questions (which could have been solved by reading the manual). In fact, if you look at the highest scores in almost any programming language on SO, you'll see that it's mostly the trivial questions, (POV-questions aside), the questions with in-depth answers and complicated subject matters don't attract as much traffic. So, apparently, closing such questions will do disservice to the site. Some times it feels unfair that you had to do more work to figure the answer yourself, while someone will get it "for free", but I think that the proper reaction is to ignore the question, if that's what you feel. Closing it will have no pedagogical effect.

---

Here, just to show that I'm not dreaming it: these are the highest rated questions in Python tag of SO:

I assure you, any of these can be easily answered through reading online documentation and loads of books, blogs and manuals that are immediately found through any search engine.

Answer 2

"FWIW, I answer lots of easy-to-find-the-answer questions. I agree that people should be allowed to ask & answer them. I agree that help from others is relative to whether someone repeatedly makes little effort. I still think that SO and english.stackexchange.com have the right approach by encouraging people to make an initial effort, and to describe to others what they have already tried. And I think that lack of such info can be a reason for closing. And yes, closing questions, like downvoting them, can improve question quality. And encouraging users to ask Emacs first helps them, IMO."

I agree with all of these points except for the two sentences about closing. A closed question is a question not wanted on site (duplicates aside). If someone asks a question which they find not trivial, but it gets closed because of not enough research, it says "we do not want ignorant questions like yours on our site". Downvoting says that "the question should be improved", this is not the same thing.[1]

This is fundamentally different from duplicates : when we close a question for duplicate, we do close it (but not in a "we don't want your question here" way, in a "let's make this question a path to the good answers" way) and we explain to the user that "this question has been asked before, it has a lot of good answers already, so he will be better helped by reading this other question than by waiting for a quick answer here". The implied criticism of "not enough research" is probably perceived, but it is still implied.

Let's not forget that ultimately, all stackexchange does is rephrasing documentation, over and over. That does not mean that the questions or answers are trivial. Sometimes documentation is not easily available. Sometimes it takes months of work to deeply understand its meaning. What answerers are doing is not copy/pasting routinely from manuals, it is using their experience and knowledge of the topic to find the very relevant passage, and then rephrase it so that the OP (and future visitors) get enough understanding to solve the problem from the question.

Just a simple test: you are looking for how to do something trivial in a language you are not too familiar with, so you ask <search engine>. In the results, you have a stackexchange page, and a documentation page. Which one do you read first?

And last, in my opinion the situation also depends on the age of the site: for older sites, such as SO or english.se, it is likely that most easy interesting questions are already asked, and that a user asking a new one should point out how his question is not already answered. This policy helps the user not waste time carefully asking a question which was already answered. But our site is still young, a lot of easy interesting questions (yes, I put the one that you mention in this category) are still available, and they should exist.

[1] Questions can be closed, editted (by the OP or someone else), and then reopened. But in my opinion, "not enough research" as a close reason does not leave much room for improvement beyond deletion. If the question is unclear, this is an entirely different issue.

Answer 3

No

First, "minimal effort" is vague enough to vary from person to person. An answer I could find in ten minutes might take a complete noob an hour. It might take someone else two minutes.

Second, what is a great answer for a more experienced user is clear as mud to a new user. Repeating that "page 1 of the manual says you just need to flibber the widget, which would solve your problem if you'd taken the effort to read it," is a lot less helpful than explaining what those terms mean, (and perhaps mentioning where to find it).

Third, even if the user asking the question put in zero effort, at some point somebody is going to have the same question. If the answer's already there, it's that much easier for them.

In the end, this is a question and answer site. If the answers all come down to some vague "you have the answer - if you search long enough."

Answer 4

Negative, for the following reason:

I'm more concerned with how well a question is phrased and its relevance. A question matching these conditions will be useful. For example, I asked the following question on SO:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13115700/salt-stack-grains-vs-pillars

The resulting discussion raised some issues that I was unaware of, even though I supplied my own answer (a legitimate SO activity).

Additionally, sometimes a question is raised because an problem has occurred through a third party dependency. The OP has no direct interest in the subject matter, but simply wants to fix an unanticipated error.

Answer 5

In your question, you make a fundamental assumption that is incorrect. Your reasoning hinges on the premise that the intent of the asker is germane. This is wrong for two reasons:

• It is impossible to know the asker's intent. All you can know is what the asker usually wrote. Sometimes this makes it apparent whether the asker expended effort into searching for an answer, sometimes not.
• Answers on Stack Exchange are not just intended for the asker, but for future visitors who will keep coming over the years. Even if the asker was incredibly lazy, what really matters is whether the answers are useful to future visitors.

Closing a question affects all future visitors identically, so it doesn't make sense for a close reason to depend on the intent or experience of the original poster.

By all means, if the solution can easily be found in the documentation, explain how to find the solution using Emacs's built-in documentation search tools. (But don't forget to actually answer the question.)

There is a site feature to indicate that you wish the asker had spent more effort researching the question:

This question does not show any research effort; it is unclear or not useful

This feature is downvoting. Do not use a close vote in lieu of a downvote, they have different purposes.

There was a similar debate about Stack Overflow a while ago. You can read my thoughts here and here, and Shog9's conclusion. In a nutshell, Stack Overflow had a close reason that was interpreted as “lack of effort”; it was causing a lot of harm (especially as a lot of people ended up considering that any effort that fell short of finding a solution was insufficient) and was eventually reworded to avoid this interpretation (at least in good faith).