We should bring back the "question must show a minimal understanding" close reason

Question

As per this discussion, the old "questions must demonstrate a minimal understanding of the problem being solved" close reason has been replaced.

However, questions such as this one (*) (and innumerable others) keep popping up, posted by people who have absolutely no clue what they are talking about, or anyway completely lack the minimum prerequisite knowledge to work with whatever they are working with, and thus formulate a good question.

I suggest we bring back a close reason along the lines of "no offense intended, but you really don't seem to know what you're talking about"; all existing close reasons just don't convey the same message.

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(*) Now deleted after heavy downvoting and a flame war in comments where the OP attacked and insulted downvoters to the point of requiring moderator intervention.

Answer 1

I'd like to see it make a come back, there are far too many people asking questions that are basically HALP ! I have no idea what I'm doing or where to start. Please guide me.

The quality of questions on SF has continued to decline to the point where now instead of a river of crap we have an Amazon Basin full of shit and it ain't getting any better. This is entirely because SF has been forced to sink to the lowest common denominator - that of clueless noob. It would great if we got even 10% of our questions that were professional quality from anyone.

The ""reasonable business information technology management practices" close reason seems somewhat underused and would probably be good candidate for replacement.

In the mean time use a custom close reson, this is one that I have stolen from @wesley which seems to fit the bill entirely.

This question is being voted for closure because the author does not show a level of technical understanding or appropriate due diligence in researching the topic that the community judges as being a minimum barrier to participate.

I am also having some success with custom close reasons like

... because Serverfault should not be expected to provide Reading Manuals as a Service.

... because Server fault should not be expected to provide Reading Error Messages as a Service

... Serverfault is for Q&A not Remote Diagnostics as a Service.

Answer 2

My suggestion to solve this issue would be to merge two of the existing close reasons (in order to free up space, but also because it makes sense to merge them) and to add a new one.

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The new close reason would be analogue to the old "questions must demonstrate a minimal understanding of the problem being solved", with a little more emphasis on the "you really don't seem to have a clue about what you're doing" part, but without being excessively patronizing and also offering a way out. A possible wording could be:

Questions must demonstrate a basic understanding of the problem being
solved and the technologies involved; they must also show at least some
research effort on your part. If you think you are out of your depth
working on this issue, you should consider hiring a professional.

This would also work nicely for those questions (and there are lots of them) where "RTFM" or "hire someone who knows what he's doing" are the only appropriate answers.

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In order to free up the space for this new close reason, I suggest to merge "must be about managing information technology systems in a business environment" and "should demonstrate reasonable business information technology management practices" into a single close reason encompassing both (which are actually quite similar), such as:

Questions must be about managing information technology systems in a
business environment, using reasonable business IT management practices.
Questions related to home and end-user computing, development or
testing, unsupported hardware or software platforms and unmaintained
environments may not be suitable for Server Fault.

This would leave out the whole "should be asked on SO or SU" part, but this is ok, because that is already covered perfectly by the "this question belongs on another site in the Stack Exchange network" close reason, which also allows migration.

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This solution would remove some overlap between several existing close reasons (the two I'm suggesting to merge and "belongs on another site"), and would add a new close reason covering "you don't seem to have a clue", "RTFM" and "you should hire a professional", the three biggest and most common pitfalls of hopelessly flawed questions.

Answer 3

So what are you trying to accomplish, exactly?

I mean, here's your example:

It got deleted in under two hours and never got an answer. Closing it would've accomplished nothing; all closing does is prevent answers and make questions eligible for deletion.

Sorry if that comes off as patronizing; we've had this discussion a few times over on Stack Overflow, and every time I get the feeling that folks don't quite understand what closing does. And unfortunately, I'm getting the same impression here reading this discussion. You're laying out a bunch of problems and then... proposing a solution that doesn't address them.

So just to reiterate...

Closing a question accomplishes two things:

1. Stops answers from being posted.
2. Makes the question eligible for fast deletion.

Crucially, closing doesn't downvote the post. Not even once. Definitely not some sort of "super-downvote". It doesn't hide posts from the homepage, or deemphasize them in search results. It does feed into the logic that'll rate-limit or block users from asking questions, but carries no more weight there than a plain old run-of-the-mill downvote - by which I mean that one closed question, 5 close votes from the pool of 3000-rep privileged users, does about as much to stop repeat questions as that one downvote from someone with 125 rep.

Why am I harping on downvotes? Because, over the past 30 days, y'all have down-voted 1162 questions at least once... While voting to close 1273. In other words, I get the distinct impression that you're already using the wrong tool for the job in many cases, and are seeking ways in which you can expand on that usage.

Remember: your example involved someone asking a question, raging impotently against anonymous downvoters, and then deleting his own question. If you're trying to get rid of someone, it's really hard to beat that for an outcome.

So again: what problem are you trying to solve here?

Answer 4

I totally agree that there are a lot of questions where the minimal understanding close reason would apply and is better than any of the other canned reasons, but on the other hand, I don't think a more accurate close reason matters.

• Any small (3 custom off-topic, I think, + too broad and opinion-based) set of canned explanations isn't going to cover every situation.

• Most of the people asking questions that get closed for one of the canned reasons don't understand that they're boilerplate text and are sometimes approximate. Most of them don't understand the SE system well enough to come back and ask the right questions to clarify what's wrong.

• The existing close reasons also apply to a lot of questions and I'd hate to lose them.

Frankly, I've gotten tired or reading so many crappy questions, I do some close reviews and vote on those, read a few questions on the Newest tab (and usually vote to close 1/2 or 3/4 of them 'cause they're crap) and that's it. So ultimately I don't care too much what they close reasons are, if I see something and think it should be closed, I'll find a suitable reason.

For some perspective on our whole river of crap, I've noticed a few other sites (English Language and Usage, Christianity, and Movies and TV) have been complaining about a similar (but much smaller scale) "flood" of crappy questions. They're asking the same questions about what they can do about it, is it driving off higher-rep users, etc., and they aren't figuring out anything to do about it any more than we did.

Back to the actual question: If I had to give up one of the existing close reasons...

Questions seeking installation, configuration or diagnostic help must include the desired end state, the specific problem or error,

I use this a lot, it covers all of the "how do I install/setup X" and "X isn't working, what's wrong" questions.

Requests for product, service, or learning material recommendations

This is pretty much a standard SE reason, and gets used a lot.

Questions on Server Fault must be about managing information technology systems in a business environment

I use this a lot, because I think most of the questions that people vote to migrate to another site are crap and should be closed in place.

Questions should demonstrate reasonable business information technology management practices.

I use this a lot, covers X/Y problems, "you're doing it wrong" and "OMG WTF BBQ?!" questions.

So that leaves the control-panel reason which does get used a bunch, but could maybe be absorbed into the reasonable business practices reason? This would be my vote for the least-used of the current bunch.

Answer 5

Personally, I think that if the powers that be at StackExchange would ease up a little on allowable custom-close reasons, the problem would solve itself. In all seriousness, I'm voting to close your question because it sucks and Your question is bad and you should feel bad are both excellent close reasons, one of which should be in the list of selectable close reasons. Accurate, succinct, unambiguous, clear, and direct.

Contrast that with one of our wordier, pink-n-fluffy close reasons (like the previous "minimal understanding" one).

Questions seeking installation, configuration or diagnostic help must include the desired end state, the specific problem or error, sufficient information about the configuration and environment to reproduce it, and attempted solutions. Questions without a clear problem statement are not useful to other readers and are unlikely to get good answers.

It's less clear and less direct, and somehow (incredibly) generates significant levels of effort and confusion on the part of the unwashed hordes, and seems (to them) to hold out hope that enough whining or complaining can get the close undone. It's leading them on, and no one likes a tease.

Take this question as an example, about someone who wants to minimize downtime when updating his white box server (that he can't tell us anything about). Saying his question got closed because he doesn't understand enough about what he's doing, or possibly didn't provide enough information and providing a link on how to ask better questions strongly implies if he works at it, he might be able to make his question acceptable for the site, when the reality is that question is fundamentally unsalvageable.

If, for some reason, we don't want to honestly advise people how bad their questions are and offer up appropriate emotional states they ought to be feeling based on that, we should at least relieve them of any illusions about the future of their question, and give a clear, honest assessment about asking future questions of a similar quality or nature.

I'd favor something along the lines of:

Your question is bad and you should feel bad. GO AWAY.

...but anything clear and direct would seem to me to be an improvement.

Answer 6

Almost always I think the "reasonable practices" answer would apply. I think this is an answer in search of an issue. Unfortunately I think we get a lot of developers that think they are admins.