What's happened to value in research effort?

Question

See this question:

Cause of LED burn

Somehow this question has received six upvotes, despite that the problem is obvious to anyone with even the most basic understanding of electronics, and there is hardly a search that does not contain the words "how" and "led" on Google that does not yield the solution.

I couldn't find a similarly basic question on Stack Overflow, so I made one: error in python program. I don't have enough rep on SO to see the up/down vote split, but it got a net -3 votes and three votes to close as "too localied" in 15 minutes. The correct answer was upvoted, as were the correct comments, but the question was clearly not well received. In 15 hours, the question was closed.

The upvote mouseover says "This question shows research effort; it is useful and clear".

The downvote says "This question does not show any research effort; it is unclear or not useful".

The goal of Stack Exchange, I've thought, was not just to find questions, but good ones. I've read this several times, but see this blog post:

SO (and later, SE) would be a platform to encourage intelligent, invested answers deserving of links across the Internet and useful for generations to come.

Too local? Take it to Yelp. Too easy? Take it to Google. Too subjective? Take it to Quora. Too fun? Take it to Facebook.

It seems to me that this question was upvoted on solely on the basis of having a clear answer, but not being a good question.

I'd also point out that this question itself (meta-meta!) has received a downvote. Was it because "this question does not show any research effort; it is unclear or not useful?" Or, was it because someone just didn't like the implication of this question?

Answer 1

First I should point out that I wrote the answer you are referring to, which at this time has received 11 up votes.

I took this as a good example of a ignorant but not stupid question. This guy clearly lacks even the most basic electronics knowledge, but his question is reasonable in that context. Perhaps he could have found the right search terms to answer this question on Google. Quite possibly the not quite targeted search terms he would have used would have yielded a bewildering pile of stuff, some unrelated and useless, some over his head, and maybe a decent answer in there somewhere although he may not have found it or recognized it in the large pile of search barf.

But he asked here, and he asked well within his limited knowledge. I don't have a problem with that. I tried to keep my answer pretty simple and explicit, while still providing a little more information that he can absorb with some additional learning on his own. I also thought this was a pretty good LED with resistor question, so answered it in a way to make it useful as a reference for future "what kind of resistor do I need with my LED?" questions.

I disagree that this site is only for advanced electronics questions. The important thing is that the questions themselves are well asked and the asker is truly in need of information that isn't trivially excessible out there at his level of knowedge. For example, if someone asks "How much current does my PIC 16F84 take?", then I hope we would downvote it to oblivion and close the question. The difference is that anyone that knows enough to ask about a particular PIC and its current draw must know there is a datasheet and has no excuse for not knowing this information is in it.

A similar but acceptable question would be "I am confused how the various supply currents in the datasheet for my PIC 18F84 on page xxx apply to my project. How do I use these to determine the expected current draw?".

Answer 2

I have no problem with answering questions like these, and I wholly advocate being friendly to beginners. But one can do all these things without upvoting the question. An upvote isn't just a cookie to the asker that says "good job, you have asked a question that is on topic and can be answered." That's indicated by not closing the question. Rather, if I take all the questions and sort them by votes, the ones at the top should be valuable and interesting questions that don't provide something I can easily get somewhere else.

Not all ignorant questions are bad ones; only the ones that are easily answered with Google are bad questions. Here's an ignorant but good question: How does the current know how much to flow, before having seen the resistor? It's a good question because no combination of the words in the title or question fed to Google will give the answer. Even if you know to look for transmission line, this question is a great rhetorical explanation which I've never encountered anywhere else.

On the other hand, Cause of LED burn is an ignorant but bad question because even if we search for "cause of led burn", we get How to Wire Resistor Load in LED Lights on the first page. If one were to try the same search with more ordinary English, like "how to light/use/connect LED", the answer is in the first result. Even just "how LED" gives an answer. Even just "LED" finds Wikipedia as the first result, and the first paragraph under "Considerations for use" discusses a current limiting resistor. It has more translations than I care to count.

There's really no excuse for not finding this information. Anyone who asks other people to answer it either needs a reminder of basic etiquette or help in developing basic research ability.

It is true that the evaluation is only as good as the people reading it, but is it really true that more people than not in this community thought this was an interesting question? I think the problem is more that people are overlooking the intended basis for evaluation. Google already ranks the most common problems most highly; the value in SE is that questions can be ranked on a basis that can't be calculated by computer algorithm: interestingness.