Timeline for Whatever happened to helping people?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
14 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jul 18 at 11:51 | comment | added | demim00nde | I appreciate the points you're making on viability and responsibilities that are on the person posing the question. However, I think they are also serving as a bit of a cop-out. There exist conditions - which you aren't taking account of - in which helping to improve the question is equivalent to answering that question, since it helps the person learn and grow. If we measure things by how much work they involve, it sounds like an argument to shut down the site. To be clear, I'm specifically addressing a scenario where due effort has gone into asking a question. | |
| Jul 4 at 12:38 | comment | added | Xander Henderson Mod | @demim00nde When a question is closed, an explanation for why people voted to close that question is displayed in a blue banner above that question. Those boilerplate explanations might not tell you everything you want to know, but that is where you should start. | |
| Jul 3 at 22:10 | comment | added | Mike | Well, but given the barrage of low-quality questions, we as a site generally don't have the time or energy to be focusing on helping people try to improve their questions, especially as (a) we have too many of these low-quality questions to focus on, and (b) for many a low-quality question, there often is not a path to making the question good. The expectations of what constitutes a good question are laid out already tour | |
| Jul 2 at 16:56 | comment | added | demim00nde | @Brick Requiring an explanation to the poster when voting to close would seem like a decent piece of functionality, with the possibility of comeback by the user. I remember a question I worked very hard to form being closed without explanation, and it doesn't feel like any general principle can be a legitimate excuse for that. | |
| Jul 1 at 13:37 | comment | added | Brick | @demim00nde - I made an edit to clarify when commenting should be avoided. Presumably you still won't agree with that based on your other comments, but it's at least a step toward being clear about where we disagree. | |
| Jul 1 at 13:36 | history | edited | Brick | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
Clarify point about when comments are no appropriate
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| Jul 1 at 13:30 | comment | added | Brick | @demim00nde - There are certainly times where comments to clarify at valid. My issue is that there are a LOT of questions lingering on the site that had no real chance of being answered (too poorly written, clearly someone asking for a full solution to their homework, etc.) that linger on this site because the garner 2+ comments that had no real chance of leading to an answer. This site is not setup to be an office hours format. People who need interactive help really need to get into a chat room or on a site oriented toward that need. | |
| Jul 1 at 13:13 | comment | added | demim00nde | Asking a clear question is half the battle of learning. Failing to help someone get their question right is bad enough. Actively advocating that such questions be ignored seems simply subversive. | |
| Jun 28 at 14:28 | comment | added | FShrike | I have no thesis. I mean only to flag a belief (which seems to be at least somewhat shared) that deletion is stronger than closure and is, in some cases, unwarranted. Let’s be real: the reopen and undelete services very rarely act, because (a) users with enough privilege are rare (b) users actually have to read the questions and answers carefully and decide that they truly care, which many won’t make the time to do. | |
| Jun 28 at 12:39 | comment | added | Brick | I don't think you made that clear at all. When you scrape away the parts that are just "microrant" (your word), your thesis seems to be this: "these posts were doomed to closure and for the most part I agree that they should be closed". So you hedged that a bit with "for the most part", but in the end you are arguing for keeping questions that you know are low quality or blatantly off-topic. There's no universal guard to prevent mistakes or resolve disagreement. The reopen and undelete process are available to resolve disagreements or mistakes. It's not a perfect system though for sure. | |
| Jun 27 at 23:08 | comment | added | FShrike | Examples where the community disagrees or got it wrong about quality or potential value are obviously relevant. They are exactly the fringe cases I mean to discuss; the broader issue is a genuine issue, and I’ve made it very clear I agree it’s a genuine issue. I’ve also made it clear I agree most deleted etc. questions deserved to be deleted | |
| Jun 27 at 15:12 | comment | added | Brick | @user264745 - Maybe we'll have to agree to disagree, but I think you missed the point. The system itself deletes closed questions under certain conditions. Users leaving frivolous comments and answers are defeating even the site's self-maintenance. It has NOTHING to do with votes to delete, which is a separate process. math.stackexchange.com/help/auto-deleted-questions | |
| Jun 27 at 14:58 | comment | added | Brick | @user264745 - The original post is about the practice of answering questions when the person answering knows (strongly believes) that the question is off-topic or low quality. The possibility that one might find some examples where the community disagreed about quality or possibly even got it wrong is not relevant to the broader issue. I gave no opinion about the specific posts. I have a strong opinion that the OP's notion of "helpful" as described at length in the OP and the comment is distinctly not helpful. | |
| Jun 27 at 12:39 | history | answered | Brick | CC BY-SA 4.0 |