How could I improve these questions?

Question

I have already asked several question that I got down-vote for those. look:

• What are these components?
• Need to a good source for know electronic component (for newbies)
• Can i calculate the parasitic capacitance in Altium?

And in some cases, I deleted those because they just give down-vote. look:

• Why can't an ARM MCU fast set/reset it's pins like a 8bit MCU(like AVR)?
• Why don't the ARM MCUs have any eeprom?
• What are the best source for learn reverse engineering?
• What's the difference between this crystal package?

How can i improve these?

Answer 1

While I would not usually go back and look at old questions, in this case I did look at every question you have linked, mainly because you asked on chat about being banned from posting any more questions.

I am a bit surprised that I didn't downvote any of those questions: On rereading, most of them tempt me to downvote, for several reasons which I will detail below.

The poor English by itself is not a big concern, because I often work with people whose grasp on English is worse than yours.

• What are these components?
  I remember this one. First, this question expects either familiarity with the specific board, or a lot of guesswork.
  Second, knowing what each of those components are, does not fulfill any reasonable or productive electronic design purpose I can conceive of.
  Finally, your comments "Thanks but your answer isn't complete" "i think it's better that first if you think the question isn't clear, ask your question at first and when you be sure, answer to me." were shockingly irritating.
  None of the contributors here is being paid for doing this - so even if you can't be grateful that you got some response, turning around and making a rude remark like that instantly puts you in people's blacklists. Telling someone how you think something should be done, might be fine with people whose salary you pay, or to students if you are a teacher, and even then they're probably going to quit when they read that. With volunteers donating their personal time to help people on the Internet? No way!

• Need to a good source for know electronic component (for newbies)
  This question comes from a very impractical viewpoint, i.e. it does not demonstrate sufficient research before posting the question:
  Firstly you probably do not realize how absolutely massive a database would have to be, to cover just a complete list of part numbers of every currently manufactured electronic component, let alone any additional information about them.
  Secondly, someone who isn't willing to page through individual product pages on a site like Digikey, isn't going to get very far in the world of electronics - a single page listing of hundreds, let alone tens of millions of components: Do you realize how impractical that would be?
  Thirdly, even DigiKey doesn't cover half of the components I have come across and used over just the last one year: Depending on the specific problem on hand, EEs put in weeks, even months of research identifying parts that suit the requirement. Clearly you are looking for a shortcut to that process - if such a shortcut were possible, someone would have done it by now, no?

• Can i calculate the parasitic capacitance in Altium?
  This is one of your less terrible questions.
  However, your final words "if no, please provide a program untill i use it for solve my problem" - I think that might be partly a poor grasp of English, because it comes across as "gimme teh codez", an expectation of a shortcut being provided to you. While people would provide shortcuts when they can, the tone of the sentence makes people disinclined to respond.

• Why can't an ARM MCU fast set/reset it's pins like a 8bit MCU(like AVR)?
  This sentence: "some ARM based MCU like AT91 is rubbish!"
  Seriously? Do you believe you have the expertise and experience to make such a statement? That line makes you appear to be an immature, opinionated child, I can see why the downvotes occurred.
  Your comment "then it's better we come back to past!!" added to the impression, because clearly you did not try to do some research on why different products take different approaches and have differing behavior.

• Why don't the ARM MCUs have any eeprom?
  There's no point asking about a design decision on a site that isn't a representative of the designers, right? This might be worth asking the designers of the ARM architecture and its implementations, if you really felt that they left EEPROM out as a "defect", and didn't have some solid design reasons for it.
  In other words, this is not a question that, on this site, fulfills any practical purpose I can think of.

• What are the best source for learn reverse engineering?
  This question is way too broad for this site, and probably even for the Reverse Engineering Stack Exchange that was suggested to you. Also, from the question, and your previous ones, the impression I get is that you would need to learn much more of the basics of electronic design, before venturing into reverse engineering - so any answer would be wasted.

• What's the difference between this crystal package?
  This question demonstrates a lack of research before posting: If you are not familiar with SMD versus through-hole components, and lack at least some awareness of their relative advantages and disadvantages, what is the point of the question? If you do know the difference, then why ask the question?

Now, to answer the key question of your meta post: What can you do to improve your questions and not get downvoted all the time?

• First: Be less opinionated. We all have opinions, but people will generally tolerate the expression of such opinions much more from somebody who is also provably knowledgeable about the subject, than someone who isn't.

• Second: Do a lot more research before posting a question (or an answer). There are no shortcuts, you have to understand underlying fundamentals before you can formulate a meaningful question on a topic such as "Why do ARM devices not usually have EEPROMs". Do not assume that whoever designed a given product was a fool, instead go out there and read a lot about the subject.

• Third: Focus on practical questions that address a specific electronic design problem you are facing. Your questions have mostly been purely speculative or non-problem-oriented, leading to a consistent set of downvotes, and opinions about the low value of your posts. For general chit-chat about electronics, use the chat room, not the Q&A system. Chat is much more tolerant.

• Finally: If your posts and comments have been coming across as far more rude than you intended them to be, it might be a good idea to ask someone you know, who has a good cultural and linguistic understanding of the English-speaking world, to review your posts for you, till you understand why the tone of some of your posts gets negative feedback.

I realize that this long post of mine might be coming across as extremely harsh, but please re-read it after you calm down, and you will see that I do not mean any ill-will, I have just deconstructed your posts in an attempt to help address your meta question.

Answer 2

I can only tell you how I perceived your questions and what I did about it.

What are these components?

I didn't up/down vote but answered. You seemed to want exact answers for something we can at best take a guess on. I answered with general guesses and left it at that. When you complained that my answer wasn't complete, I thought to myself screw this and tuned out the question altogether after that. I didn't go back and fix what I decided was a mistake in my answer after seeing it again.

Need to a good source for know electronic component (for newbies)

I didn't see that one, but agree with closing it. If you can't understand why this is not a fit for this site, then you need to read the rules. If it's still not obvious, then you don't belong here.

Learning reverse engineering

Again, if you still can't understand why this was closed, do both you and us a favor and go elsewhere.

What's the difference between this crystal package?

I never saw that, but you did get one answer. I might have downvoted if I had seen it. I imagine the downvotes are because the question is poorly written, making it annoying to read, and pretty stupid on the face of it. You show good pictures of two clearly different packages, then ask what's different!

The poor English makes this question annoying to read. I realize that English is probably not your first language, and this isn't probaby your fault, but in the end that only matters a little. Foreigners do get a little slack, but, like with everything else in the world, it's results that ultimately matter.

Bad English is annoying to read. If you write bad English, you are going to annoy people here, plain and simple. Again, we sometimes will allow for some annoyance in processing a question when it's a result of English not being the first language, but the annoyance is still there. Remember, it's you who came here to this previously-existing English-language site. No it's not fair, but it is what it is. This is the real world.

Think of it from my point of view. I can spend time reading this question and doing the annoying mental processing of getting past the bad English to the real question, or I can spend that time clicking downvote, close, and moving on to the next question. Like it or not, that is exactly the choice I have every question I read. You can't expect me to spend extra volunteer time on parsing badly written questions.

As a result, when there are any other issues with the question, bad English will push the needle more towards screw this. In this case I suspect the apparent stupidity of the question, showing essentially no reasearch effort, was the first problem and the bad English pushed it over the edge.

Answer 3

I agree with @Scott's comment:

When I see poorly formulated English coming from a person who obviously is a non-native speaker, I try to recognize the writer as a person who can communicate in at least one more language than I can. The language use won't get better without practice, and we have a wonderful editing system here where those w/ the time can set things straight.

I edit a lot of questions for proper capitalization, punctuation, grammar, etc. I try to give non-native English speakers a break, but sometimes I just get frustrated with trying to make sense of questions. In the case of your question about parasitic inductance in Altium.

Here's an excerpt of the last paragraph:

I use AVR and i couldn't find the capacitance of the microcontroller pins(if you know, please tell me) but, my problem is that i don't know how can i calculate the parasitic capacitance of the traces. can i calculate it by altium? if yes, how? if no, please provide a program untill i use it for solve my problem.

I downvoted the question for a few reasons:

1. There are multiple instances of reminding the audience to provide you with information. That's the whole point of the site. There's no need to insert comments like "If you know, please tell me."

2. An almost immediate negative reaction can be expected when, as a question author, you ask your audience to provide you with a program/solution/schematic/product, etc. Our interest is in helping others arrive at conclusions with answers, not in providing tools or designs. Providing someone with a solution is not the same as providing someone with the information and knowledge to arrive at that solution. There's an old adage: "Give a man a fish and he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime." I think that is representative of the philosophy here, and as such, we never want to simply give you a "fish" and walk away.

3. I find it frustrating to try and read things that have simple mistakes in capitalization, grammar and spelling. As Scott stated in his comment, we can usually tell when someone is not a native English speaker, and we are lenient in that regard. I usually edit such questions quietly, but also sometimes I leave a comment for the author to be aware of some of those mistakes. In a recent example, it sort of backfired. That is never the intent. The purpose was to inform the OP that it would be beneficial to avoid such mistakes in the future. (Again, teaching.) I seem to recall that some of your questions earlier had been edited or myself or others had left comments to this effect, but as per your last paragraph, it had not improved.

I hope this helps, it's nice to see your questions here, but even moreso to see them easily readable and not demanding solutions without knowledge. :)