After spending quite a bit of time doing thousands of reviews of first posts, suggested edits, editing questions and trying to understand the comments/concerns about the quality of the site, I am wondering if MSE should consider a Question Wizard Guide. This Wizard would 'unobtrusively' guide users when posting questions.
When someone posts a question, the wizard will display a set of translucent guides to help the OP. Note, these would not be binding, but are only for showing the basic level of quality desired (they can still make bad posts, but if those are closed, at least they have a better idea as to why).
For example, this could include:
- Clearly written and formatted question: <...>
- Your attempts and thoughts on the problem: <...>
- Source of the problem: <...>
- Note, failure to comply with basic minimal quality standards could result in closure of your question.
We can decide what this list would be, but I think this would go a long way in addressing the concerns of all parties (OPs and the MSE Community both).
This would have the added benefit of letting new posters see that posted questions follow a certain level of consistency/quality (because we know they don't read the FAQ) and, I believe, that this is one of our missions, to help the newer mathematicians learn the importance of properly communicating.