3
$\begingroup$

Comment under Why is the moon tidally locked with the earth? with +4 votes

I’m voting to close this question because there's no evidence that OP has done any research.

Comment under Plane of Moon's orbit around earth with +3 votes

I’m voting to close this question because there is no evidence that OP has done any prior research for this question. The Wikipedia article has clearly explained the topic

In my understanding the recommended action for insufficient prior research is the down vote.

enter image description here

We have several standard reasons to close questions thereby blocking all community members from opportunities to write an answer and the entire internet of the future from reading them, but lack of research is not one of them.

What concerns me here is a recent uptick in close votes for lack of research and their upvoting - folks are getting the idea we must punish the question asker for insufficient research, the subsequent collateral damage to the site due to answer prevention be damned.

Recall that we are building an answer base not a question base. Blocking answers because we think the question could have been written better is antithetical to the Stack Exchange mission. We can work on question improvement in several better, and more helpful ways.

I feel this trend is wrong and it's catching on because users are seeing other users doing it apparently unchecked.

We can downvote a question and still allow good answers to it to be posted.

We can leave helpful comments explaining why we down vote.

But isn't inventing a new *and increasingly popular close reason specifically for apparently insufficient prior research contrary to how this site has operated for years?

Is there a way to reduce?

  1. For example, is there some mechanism whereby when someone is typing words like "research" or "prior" or "first google hit" that a bubble appears indicating that it might not be a valid close reason and one might consider down voting instead?

  2. could we start cleaning up the erroneous "close for lack of research" comments that appear under questions. My thinking here (and what I think I've demonstrated a bit) is that when especially new users see this done, and up voted, they get the false notion that they can and should also start closing like this too. We don't require users to read all the guidelines, mostly folks learn by watching others and looking for "best practices" through example.

In this case the second "close for no research" voter was so anxious to close that they didn't even bother to read the comments nor the existing "close for no research" vote in the dialogue box before writing their own.

enter image description here

$\endgroup$
4
  • 3
    $\begingroup$ A related discussion on the global meta from a while back: Should a clear lack of research be grounds for closing a question? $\endgroup$
    – gparyani
    Sep 13, 2022 at 1:34
  • 1
    $\begingroup$ @gparyani thanks! Sometimes lost in the mix is that for low question rate sites like Astronomy SE, there is a lot more room and time to help question authors to improve their question-asking skills while still allowing answers to be posted. The high question rate sites may adopt a different style of necessity. But here with only a half-dozen questions per day there's plenty of time to help improve questions before they drift down the page. $\endgroup$
    – uhoh
    Sep 13, 2022 at 2:08
  • 2
    $\begingroup$ Strong agree. It should be simple - downvote for lack of effort, VTC for posts which are otherwise off-topic. $\endgroup$
    – user438383
    Sep 13, 2022 at 11:49
  • 2
    $\begingroup$ contd.. VTC should be used sparingly for questions which aren't recoverable, not because you want to punish someone who didn't put in enough effort. $\endgroup$
    – user438383
    Sep 13, 2022 at 12:26

0

Reset to default

You must log in to answer this question.

Browse other questions tagged .