Absolutely not.

You're basically suggesting that we allow the help vampires to take over and run rampant. This is a horrible idea. And I do mean a literal horror.

The problem is that encouraging people to not do their own research encourages them to interrupt others for a simple question they could have looked up themselves in a few seconds. You've probably had at least one annoying coworker exactly like this, who comes up to your desk and asks you a simple question which Google's I'm Feeling Lucky would have answered faster and in better depth, and more importantly, without you spending the next 15 minutes trying to figure out where to hide the body. Eventually you're spending more time plotting his murder than actually getting any work done.

But it's somehow OK to encourage this behavior on SF, or for that matter, anywhere? I don't think so. It doesn't do us any favors, and it doesn't do them any favors either:

Eventually people burn out after being faced with an onslaught of help vampires. (If they survive at all.) This means the sort of high quality people who write high quality answers leave Server Fault, which is exactly the opposite of what we want.

And let's not forget the detrimental effect on the help vampire. If they don't eventually change their ways, this field is going to end up full of people who can't or won't think and rely on others to do all of their work for them. There are already too many such people in IT; do you really want more of them?

Absolutely not.

You're basically suggesting that we allow the help vampires to take over and run rampant. This is a horrible idea. And I do mean a literal horror.

The problem is that encouraging people to not do their own research encourages them to interrupt others for a simple question they could have looked up themselves in a few seconds. You've probably had at least one annoying coworker exactly like this, who comes up to your desk and asks you a simple question which Google's I'm Feeling Lucky would have answered faster and in better depth, and more importantly, without you spending the next 15 minutes trying to figure out where to hide the body. Eventually you're spending more time plotting his murder than actually getting any work done.

But it's somehow OK to encourage this behavior on SF, or for that matter, anywhere? I don't think so. It doesn't do us any favors, and it doesn't do them any favors either:

Eventually people burn out after being faced with an onslaught of help vampires. (If they survive at all.) This means the sort of high quality people who write high quality answers leave Server Fault, which is exactly the opposite of what we want.

And let's not forget the detrimental effect on the help vampire. If they don't eventually change their ways, this field is going to end up full of people who can't or won't think and rely on others to do all of their work for them. There are already too many such people in IT; do you really want more of them?