I’ve spent the last two days being acquainted with stack exchange. One of the things I have discovered is the sheer inadequacy in the quality of the questions. Many of the questions simply can not be answered in a sane manner. This comes as a shock to me simply because my previous casual usage (through landing via Google) has been so positive. It is clear under all that there are a lot of rubbish which we may not see.
What exactly is this junk that we’re talking about?
Generally they may fall in the areas of:
- Not reading documentation
- Not understanding the underlying foundations of the topic at hand
For many of the software related questions, they arise from abusing code which someone else has written and give up when their copy and paste solution just doesn’t work. Sometimes this is completely legitimate; perhaps the library isn’t working as intended, or maybe they’re a beginning and didn’t understand the foundations of a particular language, but both highlight the unfortunate reaction of just posting a question anonymously hoping that someone will do the hard work for them.
The other class of problems is the refusal to research or understand underlying information in a holistic manner. For example, asking why Naive Bayes algorithm is faster than SVM. Or understanding how p-values work.
Then perhaps what is a good question?
That is a much more difficult question to answer. Often times people don’t actually know what they’re trying to solve. For example, a person who comes up with a question relating to survival analysis probably is not even aware that a field on survival analysis even exists! Or a legitimate question might be quickly dismissed since algebraically it is in fact a rather trivial result.