Are there Smart Questions ????
10 Sep 2020
What is a smart question
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 asking: is there a smart question? Well after reading Eric Raymond’s, “How to ask questions the smart way” I was enlightened on what a smart question is. 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.
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 3 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.
Overall my takeaway is that there are questions that could be answered with a simple google search and shouldn’t be in a discussion. This not only wastes other people’s time but also makes me look lazy online. Then there were ways to word my questions if I needed to go into the discussion. The last thing is that I should look it up and get informed before taking it to a discussion. This will show that I want to learn instead of just get the answer and get out. Overall I feel like there is not “dumb” questions its just that there are “lazy” questions and “smart” questions.