Should we punish and also close questions with blindingly obvious answers?

Question

There are questions that get asked, from time to time, whose answers are fundamental and blindingly obvious to anyone with a reasonable amount of knowledge about the topic being considered, such as this one:

Using DHCP, is it possible to obtain an IP address & MAC address for a cluster?

These questions are easy to answer, and assuming the asker is willing to learn, provide substantial value to the person asking as well as to anyone trying to learn how things all get put together later. The answers will explain a fundamental concept.

On the other hand, they might also conflict with the broken windows theory, and could often be answered in a moment's researching the topic.

Is it really appropriate to close these questions? Or, is it sufficient to simply downvote them but allow them an answer? Or should we not even downvote them?

Answer 1

Everyone has a different definition of what is "blindingly obvious". We all have huge gaps in our knowledge. The smarter you get, the more you realize how much you don't know.

There are plenty of questions I've asked that were obvious to someone more experienced with the particular software/hardware/whatever than I was.

And there are plenty of questions I've answered where I've had to take a step back and say "Ok...if you're asking me if I can do X with Y...you clearly have no idea what Y is for...lets explain that first."

That's the whole point of this site. I'm an expert in some areas. You're an expert in other areas. And if we all get together and share that knowledge, we become experts in a lot of areas.

That said, there are a lot of questions (and I'm far too lazy to dig up examples at the moment) of questions where I could safely say "If you don't know that already, and couldn't find the answer for yourself, you don't know enough to be charging someone money for your work." With many of these questions, they show absolutely no effort to find the solution on their own, and I vote to close them as "demonstrate a minimal understanding..."

My cutoff point for those questions is typically something along the lines of "could I type that question into google and get the answer in under 5 minutes".

The example question is on the better side of bad questions, but I would have voted to close it, and recommended the asker read up on how IP and MAC addresses work.

Answer 2

Not on that alone. This might be obvious to a network administrator, but in a highly compartmentalised IT department, if you've spent your entire life dealing with a mainframe connected to dumb terminals, and you're suddenly thrust into setting up a cluster, you might have no idea.

But what you will be smart enough is to take a few clues and figure the rest out on your own.

You can't just go around closing questions that are simple, or dumb. That's a slippery slope. Are you going to vote a question closed because "No shit bcrypt is a better hashing algorithm than md5 for passwords - every security person knows this!"

We have answers outlining the fundamental concepts of TCP/IP, so why not have a fundamental answer outlining DHCP?

Obviously someone out there didn't understand the relationship between Ethernet and TCP/IP. And that's OK. At some stage, you didn't either.

Answer 3

I see I'm one of the guilty parties. I suppose that puts on me some onus to explain.

Take a look at this question, which is also a total newbie question, and attracting downvotes and close votes as we speak (and it probably doesn't help that the author chose the username "nobrains"!).

But I think this is a good basic question. I've upvoted it, and I won't be voting to close (at least, not on the grounds of "minimal understanding" or "professional sysadmin").

Why the difference? Because the DHCP/MAC question betrays utter ignorance. There's no subtlety underlying the right answer, just spoon-feeding basic information to satisfy the OP's total failure to have read anything about the field. The www. question, on the other hand, skates around a genuine subtlety in the DNS which can catch people out big-time down the road.

Mark, you have a diamond, so you really do get to speak for the community. Nevertheless, when you write "This might be obvious to a network administrator, but in a highly compartmentalised IT department, if you've spent your entire life dealing with a mainframe connected to dumb terminals, and you're suddenly thrust into setting up a cluster, you might have no idea" I get very nervous. Are you suggesting that SF is available for people who are professionals in one aspect of sysadmin, so they can ask n00b cross-training questions, but not to people who are, say, developers, who also want to cross-train in exactly the same way? Because I can't follow you there, I'm afraid. For me, the "minimal understanding" close reason (which you say you don't like - but nevertheless it exists) means that on the subject on which you have chosen to ask a question, you are expected to have acquired a firm grasp of the basics already.

Once, when a newly-fledged sysadmin, I was listening to Eric Allman talk about some of the subtle gotchas in SMTP (he's a very good speaker, by the way). In response to his rant about the problems caused by envelope-recipient vs. header-recipient mishandling, I asked why we had to have both recipients. For my query, I got only a withering look. Once I had admin'ed a mail server, and understood why we need both kinds of recipient, I understood the look, and wholeheartedly approved of it. The check it gave me has helped remind me many times since that I need to line up my ducks before invoking "big gun" assistance.

If SF is not to sink into the mire if general ignorance, I feel it needs to maintain in all its users an attitude of "I'm going to a wellspring of experts here; I need to treat it with basic respect". Otherwise I'd just go and hang out at YvahkDhrfgvbaf.

Answer 4

I would have no problem with a total beginner question like "What is a MAC address?" Sure, it's extremely basic and lots of us could answer it in some detail (and Evan would probably crank out an award-winning book about it in 10 minutes or so), but at least if someone asks it you know where they're coming from.

By contrast, there's no way to be sure what the person asking, "Can DHCP hand out a MAC address?" does and doesn't understand. Do they not know that MAC addresses are h/w serial #s? Do they not grasp physical vs. higher network layers? Are they just stringing buzzwords like paradigm and cloud together?

Unlike Mark, I think the "must demonstrate a minimal understanding" close reason is perfect for lots of the questions I consider "bad." I don't mind a question that's basic and google-able, but if the person doesn't really know enough to know what the basic question is that they should ask, then I'll downvote and VtC w/out hesitation.

Answer 5

I'm as green as they get and I ask questions outside of my shallow knowledge pool all the time. I think the answer to Why use a converged network design in Hyper-V? is probably blindly obvious to a lot of people here but (I hope) there is a qualitative difference between my question and the one used as example (Using DHCP, is it possible to obtain an IP address & MAC address for a cluster?). There is a professional way to approach a question outside of your immediate knowledge field even if is a fundamental or basic question. It is hard to quantify this professionalism - it is one of those I know it when I see it kind of things.

I think the community is pretty good at detecting crap. Vote to close crap. Upvote the good questions, even basic ones. Profit.

Answer 6

Given that the ServerFault audience is IT professionals, I'm not sure that a question and answer explaining a fundamental concept is useful in the context of this site. Professionals should already have the fundamental concepts down.

So, as a result, I'd say that both a downvote and a close vote would be appropriate, though at the discretion of the voter. I'm not sure if I'd personally elect to downvote that example question or not, but I'd definitely close it for lacking minimal understanding. And I think everyone with the requisite privileges should be free to make the same determination.

Answer 7

If you don't want to answer basic questions then don't answer them, or better yet, don't read them in the first place. IMHO those who are willing to downvote (or "punish") a well thought out and well articulated question just because there's a basic answer to it need to take a long hard look at why they participate here and perhaps take a few days/weeks/years off.

Answer 8

All of us seen cases when even mostly obvious questions are hard to find right way of understanding. Say, DHCP server won't assign MACs, but magic word "cluster" may make it a bit unusual for some novice (and not dumb!) person to figure out that. Moreover, person may made a mistype trying to ask "Using DHCP, is it possible to obtain an IP address for MAC address if we deal with a cluster?" which is a less obvious for some novice.

Then, all of us were novices at some point. We'll also be able to call our today level of knowledge a bit novice in 10 or 20 years, won't we?

Answer 9

Personally, I think the only stupid question was the one you never ask. I would therefore be quite reluctant to penalise the blindingly obvious - mostly because I recognise that (as an IT professional) there's been a few occasions where I've had to ask them myself - when straying from the 'stuff I know' to the stuff I don't know.

If it takes negligible time to answer, then it did me no harm to answer it.

Although I might differentiate with lazy questions - once which require a significant amount of brainwork for the person answering, but without a similar degree of (indication of) effort on the part of the asker.

Answer 10

The following is my own point of view and relates more in general to the stack exchange websites than this one specifically.

I have asked questions a few times that may fall into the blindingly obvious category and have received some RTFM replies.

The thing is though, at that point in time it was never blindly obvious to me. I had spent countless hours trying to resolve the issue (with my fairly limited knowledge). Without the help and support of the stack exchange community it would have surely been quite a few more hours/days until I finally realized the error in my thinking. Sometimes all it takes it someone to look at things with a different mind set or point of view.

I find this aspect of stack exchange the most useful and to punish me for asking questions that would not have been asked if they were "blindly obvious" to me seems a bit unfair.

It's all about opinions and I can see the people with more experience (the RTFM guys) looking down on me for this one but honestly... Looking back at some of my blindly obvious questions now, they are sitting with thousands and thousands of views and I am sure they this in turn has helped countless people to resolve their own issues...

Isn't that what these website are about?

Answer 11

How is it that server fault is only for "Professionals" and who decides at what point a person is allowed to be determined they're "Professional" enough to be part of the club and write questions in a perfectly worded fashion so as to be accepting of the label "Professional."

Instead everything will just get deleted and locked if it doesn't perfectly match the ideals of a few moderators? Did comcast take over server fault or something?

The internet used to be open for everyone, if you guys are going to close off server fault, then good riddance.