In school, most teachers will tell you that there is no such thing as a dumb or bad question. The main purpose of this saying is to give us the confidence to ask questions so that we may learn. However, this does not always appear to be true. It really is not that hard to spot a bad question, but what may not be clear at first is the reason why it is bad. It is true that there is no such thing as a bad question, but there are many ways to poorly ask the question.
Take this question from StackOverflow for example:
The user is asking about a legitimate issue that he or she is does not know how to handle or solve. His or her main problem is that he or she cannot properly select the desired items with the functions being used. So naturally the question they have is, “how do I do this?” The main problem with this question is that it is quite vague. Even though the problem is described, it is hard to understand exactly what is not working. There is no context to help other users come up with an answer aside from the provided code. The language used in the question is rough, and the user very bluntly requests for someone to “give me the solution.” The provided code appears to be the entire code that the user used for his or her project, and it is not clearly specified where in the code the problem could be.
The repsonse to this question was just another large block of code that appears to be just as ambiguous and vague as the code that was provided by the person requesting help. Maybe this was what the user was looking for, maybe not. Honsetly it is hard to say by just looking at it. What we can say, however, is that this question was not intelligent and did not garner effective responses.
Now, let’s examine this question:
An immediately obvious difference is the wording of the question, which already makes it more attractive to answer. Upon reading through the question, it may seem like a bit of a relatively elementary topic that could probably be solved with some thought and research. However, the user is not simply asking for a solution to turn the given string into a dictionary but instead specifies previously known knowledge of a function that accomplishes the desired task and precisely asks how the function could be adapted to be more generalized for any list. There is clarity in what the user requires help with, and the question is based on a specific issue with the main task or problem. The results of this question are not only effective and efficient, but they are also educational as well. The top response to this question not only provides a possible solution to tackling this problem, but it also explains why and how it works.
There is never a bad topic to ask a question about, but it is important to ask your questions well if you want to recieve positive feedback. Most people will not want to willingly waste their time tyring to answer a random question if it is unclear or does not benefit everyone involved, especially on a forum like StackOverflow. You will not learn if all you ever do is ask for the answer instead of how to get the answer.
