Blindly answering easy questions without considering whether the question satisfies MSE policy.

Question

Here's the question which motivated me to write this question.

Inspite of being clearly mentioned in the MSE's homework policy about Avoid "no clue" questions this question was asked by the user. If the user is new, it is responsibility of other users to help them in knowing the policy of this site for asking questions.

But, instead of this, the question was simply answered without asking the OP for their attempt or what more they know about the context (may be just because the question was simple). The answer providers also include some of the highly reputed users of this site.

As quoted in the FAQ thread

It's much better to give a hint, so that the asker may find the right direction.

This statement was completely ignored and there was flow of answers given by the users one-by-one. I thought this is a matter of concern so I wrote this question to draw attention of other users in order to prevent MSE being an homework service site.

Answer 1

This really should be a comment to an answer from a now deleted account, but I want to elaborate on a point, and also get a reality check from others. So an answer it is.

Quoting

The truth is that 99% of math.stackexchange is just people repeating information they learned in some class or from reading a book or lecture notes. There is no actual difference between helping someone in algebraic topology or functional analysis and calc 1 or linear algebra besides ego. The gatekeeping of, "oh, is this question good enough for us to reply?" is nonsense. If it's below your standards, just ignore it.

The complaint seems to be that the bulk of janitorial work is directed at lower level questions (=sophomore or below) while advanced undergrad and graduate level homework questions in their opinion fall through the cracks.

Given that at least here I wanted to give more advanced questions some slack, I took this a bit personally in the sense that the accusation somewhat fits my tendencies. I thought about this, and want to share.

Yes, I have voted to put on hold at least ten times as many calculus / elementary-number-theory / combinatorics questions in comparison to higher level questions.

But this is not really such a heavy bias in my voting policies, nor those of the other CURED-activists.

• Sheer numbers. There are many more low quality questions in lower level tags. Simply because world wide there are more students at those levels.
• I'm on record for fighting duplicates with passion. The more advanced questions are much less likely to be duplicates. The number of questions at a particular level correlates with the number of people at that level in their studies, and this forms a triangle (or a pyramid) sitting on its low level base. The amount of mathematical knowledge, on the other hand, forms a tree-like structure, more like an inverted pyramid. These two factors imply that the duplication is disproportionately concentrated on the lower level tags. Given that I scan the close queue mostly for posts that PSQs as well as duplicates (particularly those likely to become fodder for FGITWs), this will make my "vote-to-close" stats look skewed towards lower level. My desire to "punish" FGITWs probably skews it further.
• If I run into a PSQ in stochastic math I will likely just click "Skip" simply because I lack the expertise to determine whether sufficient context has been given in the question. Likely many other follow similar (intellectually honest) policy, again with the net result that basic questions get more attention from the reviewers.
• But, I'm just a single reviewer. Judging from my observations the more systematic CURED-activists don't pay attention to the factors of the previous bullets. For them a PSQ is a PSQ irrespective of its level. Undoubtedly there are many other active reviewers all using their subjective criteria.

So it is not surprising at all that the net effect is that lower level questions are more likely to be put on hold by the reviewers. On the other hand, seeing this as a bias favoring deeper stuff seems misguided, when statistical explanations exist.

Answer 2

The truth is that 99% of math.stackexchange is just people repeating information they learned in some class or from reading a book or lecture notes. There is no actual difference between helping someone in algebraic topology or functional analysis and calc 1 or linear algebra besides ego. The gatekeeping of, "oh, is this question good enough for us to reply?" is nonsense. If it's below your standards, just ignore it.

Answer 3

Maybe an alternative opinion: answering such questions is fine, but if they aren't a useful question to future users of site, then they should also be downvoted and closed too, and eventually deleted. The answerer can do all of this. Then OP gets whatever level of help the answerer has energy for, and the post doesn't make it tougher to find useful questions on the site, and doesn't provide a bad example for future question-askers.

Of course actually giving such users help might attract more of them, making more work for the vigilant mods and CURED-saders, but I'm skeptical of the intensity of this effect. Like, I can't imagine naïve students looking for homework help find this site via word-of-mouth from peers who've gotten help asking homework questions here before; they probably just Google their exercise and find similar stuff already on MathSE. So, I mean, as long as these questions get removed, I don't think answering them will flood the site with folks asking homework questions, turning MathSE into homework-answering service.