This is regarding Bill Dubuques post. After reading the discussion, I agree that the community should be more welcoming and friendlier. I personally am not sure what to do when someone asks poorly posed questions. (also see this) There are at least a few options:
- Leave a comment asking the OP to tell us what he/she did so far.
- Vote to close.
- Vote down.
- Edit and make it a better question. (possibly putting words in the OP's mouth)
- Ignore it and answer anyway
- Edit and make it nicer, but leave a constructive comment for the OP about how to make it nicer in the future.
I don't really like any of these options, but the last one seems the most reasonable to me. I think it is important that as a community we should have an agreed upon standard, and reserve closing for unarguably poor questions.
The point of this post is: What should do about poorly posed questions?
Please post what you think, and hopefully we will be able to adopt the most supported answer.
Note 1: I don't care too much about the FAQ's say or don't say. It seems better to agree upon something as a group, and choose what we think is the right thing to do.
Note 2: When I refer to poorly posed questions, I mean questions possibly with interesting mathematical content, that are posed in a bad way, such as the imperative, or the exact way a question appears on an assignment.