Asking the Right Questions
24 Jan 2019Good and Poor Questions
The article by Eric Steven Raymond found here goes into detail about smart and dumb questions. Disclaimer: Do not contact them for generic help, they have requested this disclaimer be made. As a reflection of this reading I will be giving an example of each type of question. These questions will be from the popular forum Stack Overflow.
A Poor question
I found a question on Stack Overflow that is a good example of a poor question. It can be found here. This question displays several problems starting off with poor writing ability. It appears that the user doesn’t speak English natively but still makes unnecessary errors like spelling android incorrectly and not capitalizing the word “I”. The question is very open ended and does not provide much information on how the problem could be occurring. There are no leads given to the reader except that the error is (10). The user asking the question has not responded at all so it appears that they were unable to resolve their problem. The other option is that they are rudely not contributing the community once they got what they wanted.
A good question
I may not be an expert on questions yet but I have found a question that I feel is appropriate enough to be labeled “smart”. It can be found here. This user has clearly shown an attempt to figure out the problem themselves and has a clear goal in mind with this query. They have provided a minimal amount of code to clearly demonstrate the behavior they are concerned about. They also have neatly organized their question to make it easier to read. This problem ended up gaining a number of answers, including one that was very well documented with the intent of breaking down the concepts at play. The publicity of this question and its answer have likely provided utility to a number of other users that either had similar questions or are just interested in the concept.