Valid point
Well, I guess those “except” are the questions I mean.
I admit this one is tricky. Most questions are very easy to google thanks to QA-sites.
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Well, just psychologically I’d rather do it the other way around.
Not literally a “not homework” tag, but a “[X] standard for questions” tag.
With an according tag description “questions with this tag need an MRE and a What-I-Already-Tried section”.
Or a “category” or whatever, it really doesn’t matter what you call it - what matters is that people consciously submit to a standard.
Instead of requiring a certain standard in a more or less hidden way, while the page advertises as just “ask a question” (a description which could take so many different forms).
I think that should be solved by clearly stating what’s on scope at the question page, then aiding the poster as much as possible with wizards & scripts. Almost every question on a site similar to SO needs a reproducible example and “what I already tried”. Most technical/scientific sites will also require this info, in order to narrow down the problem.
There has been a lot of debate on eventual site policy, which is not the point here, but this actually brings up something that is.
Most sites will have certain information that often needs to be included in a question, that impatient askers often leave out. It would be useful to have a general mechanism where a few specific things need to be filled in, or a box checked this doesn’t apply. Without one or the other, the question can’t be posted.
For example, on the EE site, there might be fill-ins for What microcontroller?, a checkbox for schematic included. The Gardening site might have a checkbox for picture included, etc.
Each site can set up such a list of checkboxes or fill-ins as they see fit.
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Yes. I think we probably start with contextual help (right there on the ask page), then add templates (embedded comments in the post page), then build out some sort of form interface with the different sections. We’ll need to work out how to do the per-site customizations, which is why I’m suggesting it in this order – help is easiest to do generally (with places for per-site additions), a commented post template is a little harder to get right, and a form or similar requires the most analysis (requirements from several different sites) and development. But I think we need this path, and it fits in with different post types beyond question and answer.
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tl;dr The OP cannot be relied upon to differentiate ‘beginner’ from ‘advanced’.
There could definitely be some benefits (for some communities) from differentiating a ‘beginner Q’ from an ‘advanced Q’ in some way (whether separate communities, categories or tags) but nobody so far seems to have found any way to do so.
SE not only has the tag failure [homework] but also the community failure for Excel. Attempting such a split (SO and SU) just led to very lengthy, often heated, arguments that wore people down to the point where both sites were used for both grades of Q and most users ceased to care.
The fundamental problem is in part due to the Dunning–Kruger effect, “a cognitive bias in which people assess their cognitive ability as greater than it is”. But that is coupled with the ‘innocence of childhood’ – i.e. that some advanced Qs can be expressed in deceptively few words, making them appear simple (I’d suggest https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11227809/why-is-processing-a-sorted-array-faster-than-processing-an-unsorted-array/11227902#11227902 as an example – the entire Q is really just the dozen words of the Title, as might have been asked by someone who had observed the difference but had no other knowledge of the software, so could reasonably plump for ‘beginner Q’).
If classification is done by the asker, not knowing the A is a very good reason for getting that wrong.
A user with very little knowledge may assume whatever they ask at that point has to be a ‘beginner Q’ without realising the interesting complexities behind their query, whereas a “professional” (presumably that would have to be self-assessed) may have reached that level but still have a ‘glaring’ gap in their expertise. On SO there were very many instances where the Q contained a lot of code but the questioner seemed pleased to have an A that drew their attention to a simple formula or a built in feature. (There is one example here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/38593215/excel-find-first-instance-of-value-larger-than-reference/38617043#38617043 but I have offered at least one solution, that appeared acceptable, to a Q on SO tagged [excel-vba] or [vba] that required none of VBA, formula and function.)
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How to treat debugging and easy-to-google and very basic questions?
a) debugging – with canonical Qs and As (a pair for each different software) describing the technique, not necessarily the fix.
b) easy-to google – Close (lack of research). Answers on Codidact would add next to nothing of value anyway.
c) very basic - (assuming not easy-to-google) answer, preferably in simple terms and with good explanation .
BUT this seems to be a decision for each community rather than about the platform.
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It may indeed not always be obvious if the question is beginner or advanced, hence some moderation mechanism is needed so that trusted users can move the question where it fits in best.
For the sake of checks and balances more than one trusted user per Q would likely be advisable. And maybe sensible to restrict the relevant trusted users to experts in the topic (trusted for PHP says little about competency to judge C#). If so, it is likely quite a lot of eyes will see each Q before it is reclassified, so I doubt anyone wishing not to see Qs that are way over their head, or not see Qs that are far too basic for their taste, will be spared much.
I’m assuming that once a Q is answered it is of so much less interest to users (as opposed to viewers) that the differentiation ‘advanced’ v. ‘beginner’ would hardly matter any more (any ‘damage’ has been done by then).
The topic here is questions, but what about a ‘beginner Q’ with an ‘advanced A’ and an ‘advanced Q’ with a ‘beginner A’ (I believe both are possible).
I’m also assuming that, to start with, there won’t be any trusted users (so not MVP). Also, this could be handled by categories or tags if not crossing communities, for which no special provision is necessary (the system will need to allow for reclassifications of that kind anyway). If to be dealt with at the community level, I wonder what the solution would be for a case where the ‘advanced’ community deems the Q a ‘beginner Q’ and there is no ‘beginner’ community (or vice versa). It would seem that would resort to a simple “off topic” situation – again, for which no special provision is necessary (the system will need to allow for closure/deletion anyway).
A beginner Q with an advanced A is not a problem at all, as long as the Q and A match. If a Retrocomputing user asks a seemingly simple “Why are bytes 8-bits and not some other number?”, expecting (in their mind) a very short explanation which might be basically “8 is a power of 2, big enough for a character in most non-Asian languages” and instead gets a treatise on the history of punch cards, mainframe, minicomputer and microcomputer byte & word sizes, an explanation of why words & bytes are sometimes the same and sometimes different, data transfer sizes vs. calculation word sizes, etc." then it isn’t the end of the world. Arguably that advanced user should have known better - and in a more perfect world (which we hope to have) that would become a Canonical post or a Blog - with a very short statement and a link to that post used as an answer to the simple question. But it isn’t really a problem.
On the other hand, an advanced Q with a beginner A should be (hopefully gently and tactfully as we don’t want to turn beginners away, just get them to understand how to answer properly) downvoted/flagged/whatever to get the point across that the A is not a proper A for this Q, even though it may be sufficient for a simpler Q on the same topic.
I fear we are at slight cross purposes here. I fully agree “A beginner Q with an advanced A is not a problem at all” - per se. (Rather the opposite, personally I rather favour advanced As regardless of Q ‘grade’ - even when not “practicing what I preach”.) Here the ‘problem’ I meant was, which category/tag/community should that belong in, that for ‘advanced’ or ‘beginner’? (and similarly vice versa.) Maybe just leave it wherever it landed but perhaps the intent would be for the Q alone to determine whether or not ‘beginner’. In the latter case there would be fragmentation (‘advanced As’ amongst ‘beginner Qs’, as well as, presumably, amongst ‘advanced Qs’, and vice versa) and that seems undesirable to me.
Also, by “beginner” I was assuming ‘simple’, rather than ‘bad’. (‘bad’, whether ‘beginner’ or ‘advanced’ should be handled as you describe – no need for reclassification).
Here is an example: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20436835/filling-any-empty-cells-with-the-value-above/ that may demonstrate what I intended by a ‘beginner A’. the Q is tagged [vba] and the accepted A is a VBA solution. By analogy, that’s an ‘advanced Q’ and an ‘advanced A’. But another answer (mine, and, naturally, one I consider ‘proper’) received more net upvotes, by achieving the required result (as far as we know) in, arguably, a simpler manner. Surely a short combination of keys as a solution is not ‘advanced’. There were many times on SO (presumably hundreds as I have a silver for [vba] and have offered barely a handful of VBA solutions there) where I answered a [vba] tagged Q with a non-VBA A (usually only after a VBA solution had been offered). Often such As of mine involved either Pivot Tables or other built-in features of Excel such as Subtotal, Text to Columns, etc, which I would happily agree to be graded as ‘beginner As’. In some cases As of mine have been accepted (to Qs tagged [vba]) that did not even apply Excel – for example export to Notepad++ or Word, a simple manipulation (possibly automatic!), and reimport!
It would be a shame to bar the offer a nutcracker to someone who has a nut and is asking for a hammer.
In essence, if an ‘advanced Q’ is answered with a ‘beginner A’ (that meets quality standards) where does that Q belong, as far as ‘advanced/beginner’ goes?
I have no problem with a “beginner A” that is in reality “a simpler but effective way to get the job done”. Which is your example.
The key actually is that you include “For those not requiring VBA for this,” A true beginner would not even know what VBA is and think “duh, I know how to do this, I’ll answer”. I can certainly see situations where using VBA is a requirement - e.g., a fully automatically generated spreadsheet. A beginner would not understand that.
The “quality standards” are met by that key phrase which makes it clear you understand the question but want to provide a simpler solution. In fact, while it may well be “no good at all” for OP, someone who finds it later by Googling a variant of “Filling any empty cells with the value above” but who doesn’t use VBA (and possibly has no idea what VBA is!) will find your answer “correct”.
So I don’t think we disagree at all. The devil is in the details.
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Diverse levels of sophistication in answers is definitely a feature not a bug in the “we’re building a repository” model because one question becomes useful to a larger set of future viewers.
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