Growing up I was taught that there’s no such thing as a dumb question by many of my teachers. But now I’m here wondering: is there a smart question? Well after reading Eric Raymond’s, “How to ask questions the smart way” I was suprised on what a smart question was defined as. I’ve learned that smart questions should have processes in asking them. You should first look for the answer in frequents spots so see if someone asked this question(ex. In the FAQ or on Google) . This is so you don’t re ask the question making you look like you haven’t done anything and just want to ask. This is an inconvenience for people answering the question you may have asked. This made me rethink what I’ve been taught throughout my years and I still believe that there are no dumb questions but there are question that you can ask that are more effecent to ask.
Over the article they talk about doing your research before asking and formatting your questions in a way that will incline people to help you out. The way to do this is if it’s in a form or a mail link. We will look at examples of this on stackoverflow. In this example you can see that this is an example of a “smart question”. First of all their title of the discussion is nice and short and has everything he wants to know. He has the version that he needs help with and what’s going on that he needs help with. Here he states his background and what error he is getting. Then he states what is being removed with this update but shows what worked in the later version. This shows his knowledge in the area and lets them know he is aware of what was taken out or removed for this update. This is a nice example of a smart question. It even has a lot of upvotes which helps tell us a lot of people found this information helpful. The link to this example can be found here.
Here is an example of a “bad question”. This question first starts off with a title that doesn’t let anyone know what he needs help with. Generally starting the question with “I need help” is not a good way to start off the discussion. This can be brushed over and not help other people find the topic. This question also could have been looked up and gotten the same information. Then he just a couple of lines asking for someone to walk him through the steps it takes to get the answer. I feel like he could have looked up a YouTube video for this or even find this information in the manual or google. This question also got 0 downvotes and I feel like it got downvoted for the lack or “laziness” he had to not look it up and look through all his options before asking the discussion. The link to this question is here.
In conclusion, my takeaway from this was that there are some questions that can be answered with a simple google search and should not be used in a discussion. These types of question waste other people’s time and makes it look like you showed no effort. I’ve learned that there is no “dumb” question, only lazy questions and smart question