Timeline for Handling blatant RTFM cases---harmful to the community?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
12 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| May 23, 2017 at 12:35 | history | edited | CommunityBot | replaced http://stackoverflow.com/ with https://stackoverflow.com/ | |
| Mar 1, 2012 at 21:46 | comment | added | Oleksandr R. | ... constructive, but it's very clear that no-one likes these questions, and that there is a general view that allowing them might be harmful to the community. Since all it takes for this problem to go away is a concensus to downvote (and then close when the question has been downvoted enough times, unless someone has managed to provide a genuinely useful, non-textbook answer), perhaps that is the way to go after all? | |
| Mar 1, 2012 at 21:46 | comment | added | Oleksandr R. | I worry that in practice we would end up with a FAQ that is less than useful through being made up of mostly "if you want to do this, use that function" Q&As, simply because of the many thousands of functions Mathematica has. I'm totally agreed on the point that if the documentation is unclear, the question can be treated as genuine. But the downvote button tooltip does include "question shows no research effort", so I wonder if, in fact, we should downvote mercilessly? I haven't downvoted at all so far because I've wanted to be ... | |
| Feb 29, 2012 at 17:28 | comment | added | rcollyer | @BrettChampion, agreed on all points. I just wished to clarify. | |
| Feb 29, 2012 at 17:27 | comment | added | Brett Champion | The less obvious the documentation is, the more slack I'd cut the user. But it also depends on what the user tells us. His response to High Performance Mark indicates that there may be some other issue, but without knowing what he's tried, it's hard to say. Writing good questions takes work -- too little information is no good, but people don't generally want to wade through huge blocks of text either. | |
| Feb 29, 2012 at 17:16 | comment | added | rcollyer | @Brett I'm aware that it was documented in v7, I was just curious as to how it fit in with the "a bit more time spent searching" mentality when the places we would normally have a user search aren't clear. So, I guess my question was, how does that change things on such low level questions? | |
| Feb 29, 2012 at 17:11 | comment | added | Brett Champion | "LogCount" was a documented syntax in V7, before it was made more general. The documentation for Histogram and friends has a few areas that could be improved. | |
| Feb 29, 2012 at 17:11 | comment | added | rcollyer | @Mr.Wizard I'm not entirely sure why I feel that way. I'll come back to it later, and see if I can clarify the "whys" behind my thoughts. | |
| Feb 29, 2012 at 17:07 | comment | added | Mr.Wizard Mod | Please expound on the last sentence of your post. | |
| Feb 29, 2012 at 16:56 | comment | added | rcollyer | @Brett you bring up an interesting point. But, what do you make of this question where the current docs aren't immediately clear. It's searchable for the solution, but the example differs from the method described up top in the docs. | |
| Feb 29, 2012 at 16:48 | comment | added | Brett Champion | I don't mind answering any question once, especially if the question itself is reasonably clear. I think many of us have asked questions at some point that could have been answered with a bit (more) of time spent searching. I do think we should avoid voting up such questions, though. (Not to say we should down-vote mercilessly, but something in the range of -2 to 0 or maybe +1 seems reasonable to me.) | |
| Feb 29, 2012 at 15:05 | history | answered | rcollyer | CC BY-SA 3.0 |