Is there (or should there be) a minimum knowledge expected of users?

Question

Please note that, first and foremost, I am not here to step on toes but merely to open a dialogue.

I am new to this site, but I have used Stack Exchange for a while now and I understand and respect the premise: ask precise questions to receive precise help. This is not a "do-it-for-me" service, and due diligence is required on the part of the OP to avoid wasting volunteer time. Again, I respect this premise.

The main purpose of my question is to see if it is appropriate to expect users to have a minimum background in electronics to ask questions here and, consequently, if posts lacking that minimum knowledge should be flagged and closed.

I have seen several posts (most recently this one) where a user has a specific question but lacks some very basic knowledge, such as a working understanding of circuit diagrams. I also respect Olin Lathrop's premise (in a post that I can no longer find) that too much hand-holding and the passing of lazy posting as acceptable does not reinforce good question-asking. It is important to this site that the poorly-asked (from a technical perspective) questions be filtered out, to preserve the knowledge here. Here he also states that it is acceptable to be ignorant or uninformed, but not to be "stupid", which I also respect. (I don't mean to harp on Mr. Lathrop's comments, he just has made some excellent, relevant assertions in this case).

While knowledge such as circuit diagrams may be very basic and can be found in most high-school-level physics texts, if we aren't going to close questions on the grounds of being "too low-level" or "lacking in basic knowledge", what is the proper way to address/educate such posters? Or do we simply not want them here?

Answer 1

Questions with low technical level are OK here, as long as it appears the OP has done what they reasonably can within their capability.

However, what is not acceptable is to ask about a higher level concept while misusing or pretending to know lower level concepts. The question you linked to (MOSFET switch stops working after a while) is a example of this.

The OP showed us one of those annoying wiring diagrams instead of a schematic. This site is about electrical engineering. Electrical engineers communicate circuits with schematics, for lots of good reasons. That's how it's done. We don't care whether you think that's how it should be or not. And no, we don't want to hear excuses about why you couldn't draw a schematic, because we already know there aren't any valid ones.

Of course nobody was born knowing how to draw a schematic. But, if you don't know how, that's what you need to ask about first. In fact, one of the most highly upvoted questions on this site is about drawing schematics. If the OP had asked details about how to draw a schematic of a particular circuit, the question might have been OK. Once someone is capable of drawing schematics, they can ask higher level questions that require schematics.

If you don't know how to use a wrench, don't ask about how to replace the valve cover seals. If you're asking about replacing valve cover seals, you'll get laughed out of town if you don't know how to use a wrench. However, if you start by asking details of wrench usage, you'll probably get some good tips. Then maybe you're ready to ask about replacing the valve cover seals.

Answer 2

I don't perceive this as a problem. While I could agree that we do not want them here, there is already an implicit filter for this, implemented as the close reasons Unclear what you're asking, Duplicate, or Too broad.

Unclear what you're asking

If a user doesn't know enough about electronics to state their question in a way that makes it possible to help, the question will be closed as unclear. This includes crappy or non-existing diagrams when necessary, false statements, or misused technical terms.

It would be great if these could be minimized, but there's no difference in the workload necessary to flag something as unclear compared to a hypothetical lacking in basic knowledge.

Duplicate

If a question is clear enough, but asks an extremely basic question, it will either be easy to answer, or already have a duplicate. There's no harm having a good answer to a simple question on the site.

Too broad

Finally, if it is obvious that the user does not know enough to understand an answer, I flag it as Too broad. This is arguably not a perfect fit, but I'm using it in a relative sense.

Answer 3

That's an interesting question and I agree to the most part on many of the points and answers given here.

However, like all things in life, there are the obvious bad questions and there are obvious good questions. In between there is this huge gray area and therein lies the difficulty.

Although the forum is titled "Electrical Engineering" there is no doubt in my mind a great part of the user base is actually "Hobby Electronics". As such there are two camps. Those that have been educated over several years in recognized institutions and have years, or even decades, of experience, and those that picked up a few things in high-school or on-line, or wherever.

I could start the argument that there ought to be a separate forum for the hobby folks, but being in the other group, I rather enjoy helping out the amateurs, so I won't.

Should the amateurs have a minimum level of education. I don't think so. The site is intended to be a compendium of Q&A for people to research and learn. If everyone here already knows all the answers the site would be pretty quiet.

As for writing questions. It's not always so easy to ask a question with the right words when you don't know the terminology. What seems obvious to the initiated may not be intuitive to the OP.

It reminds me of when I first came to live in Canada and went to the hardware store to buy a particular tool. Asking the store clerk where they kept the "wire wool" I got a rather blank stare... and had to play charades to let him know what I wanted. "Oh you mean steel-wool!"..

The same goes here, but with a much wider range of details.

Personally when I look at questions I often look less at the actual question and more at HOW it is written and how the OP responds to comments. If they seem genuinely willing to learn I will spend the time to help them, even if their basic knowledge is obviously lacking. If they just want a boiler plate answer I am less inclined.

If I can answer the question in five seconds or less with Google, I shake my head and flag it to close immediately.

Ultimately, this site is a research tool. Even duplicate questions have their merit in that a slightly differently worded title can help search engines link someone's Google question. I do believe it would be better if instead of duplicate the site used "Related Questions" instead though. That way you could link both ways.

Ultimately, the quality of the questions does not really matter. Other than costing the parent company server space, and irritating some of us, it's just bits in the bucket. The current user moderation scheme seems to work fairly well considering. Whether you, as a user, decide to answer questions is up to your own sensibilities and patience.

Answer 4

There is a language barrier that needs to be overcome, if a user can do that and communicate clearly then it doesn't matter to me what background they come from. However, you have to know how to ask a good question and that requires research.

I have a problem with people that come expecting a quick answer with no work on their part. When I write questions, I spend some time researching the topic and re-read it a couple of times to make sure its clear. That way I get a better answers.

The people you want to stick around are people who are willing to be a part of the community, learn how it works (by reading the meta and help center) and contribute in some way. Instead of coming for a quick answer with minimal effort on their part.

Its also a good idea to point people in the right direction with comments and be a little bit lenient with moderating and give people time to fix their questions. Be nice (its a policy). Use the moderation system and shut down questions if they are off topic

Answer 5

As a long term user of Stack Overflow, I can share my experience about this very issue from there.

On SO there used to be a requirement "the poster must demonstrate a minimum knowledge of the topic being discussed". If they failed to do so, i.e. asking way too basic things, their questions could be closed.

This rule originated from the core idea of SO being a site for "professional or enthusiast programmers". As in, a site for people who already know programming.

Then there was a change in leadership on SO and they suddenly started to favour quantity over quality. Traffic & cash before building a Q&A programmer community.

As a result of this, moderation rules turned far more lax. The requirement that the poster must have a clue about the things they asked about was removed. It is now fine to ask questions about the most utter fundamental things answered in chapter 1 of a beginner-level programming book.

These changes happened many years ago. The result is that SO has dropped significantly in quality. There is a much higher ratio of trash questions and duplicate questions. The site is overall developing in a negative way, causing domain experts to leave, in favour for students and beginners.

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What we can learn from SO is that we should definitely not adopt a more lenient moderation policy. This question is proposing the opposite, so that's all well and good.

A site which has the ambition to provide help for professional engineers has much greater long-term potential. This would attract domain experts to the site. And thereby it will indirectly be a great help to beginners too, as the site quality will increase and the site content turns more reliable to use as reference.

EE has many similarities to SO but also differences. I don't think that EE suffers nearly as bad from "severely clueless" beginners as SO. So I wonder if this is such a big issue? Or do we fear that it might become one if the problem escalates, like it did on SO?

If long-term users of EE has noticed a quality decay of questions asked, then that is definitely a warning sign that the site might have to tighten the quality policy. Personally, I haven't actively participated here long enough to tell.

Answer 6

I have to put my two cents in here. I am a beginner, flat out, that is willing to learn. But there are issues that I and other beginners will have, the biggest which will be:

Framing the question properly - I don't have the vocabulary to describe what some of you know by instinct. Same would go if you came to the UX/UI area and needed help with the psychological differences in audiences when designing a web page that needed, by necessity, to contain a larger than average amount of information and how to structure that information so it retains the ability to be easily scanned for the relevant information on a user by user case.

I can ask in the best terms I know but in the end, I WILL ask incorrectly because I just don't know. Once I'm told, it will stick with me and I will use it.

Of course, there will be people too far out of their depth. And those will have to be dealt with appropriately but I find it very disappointing to hear comments about tests and other weed out factors. Stack Exchange is known for it's store of knowledge and it is the place I go, before Google even, to find the right answer in exacting detail. If it hasn't already been answered, then I KNOW it will be if I ask it.

The last thing that users should be doing is giving off an air of superior smugness that stops people from ever asking. I usually go through the questions in the areas where I have expertise and answer the small questions, try to steer the new user toward the right question and generally help people who need it.

Sure, cut off the obnoxious, the jerk, the obviously about to electrocute themselves. But a test?

Answer 7

Answer 8

I don't think there should be a minimum, but assumptions on who the audience or the OP is often determine the assumptions for what they understand and the level of communication. I think a minimum for this site ought to be to include a PROFILE background and geographic location which puts things into perspective like line frequency, availability of overnight shipments from distributors and scholastic training, and goals. like to make a better mousetrap, to get tech support, where little exists at work, to get real world advice to an academic or to satisfy a curiosity in the applications of electronics.

People with anonymous backgrounds. Do they deserve our time?

Also at a bare minimum the question needs self review to ask, what am I assuming that some people I want to understand may not appreciate to help answer the question. e.g. webspecs, links, photo, schematic, project functional needs,

Also any question ought to have a check box for priorities like:

• 1) least effort,
• 2) fastest schedule,hours, weeks months drop dead date
• 3) least cost , high volume, tight budget, broke, lowest risk of failure
• 4) best performance, accuracy, SNR, bandwidth , acuity, detection error rate, best false positive error rate

Then rank above prompts in any order) 5,2,1,3,4 or 1,2,x,(x) don't care about the rest

There is no such thing as a dumb question, as long as it "meets our specifications" whatever they are.... before sending it, user self check list is a good way tomfilter chaff. like ...

Have you searched the forum yet before you ask this Question?

Have you searched anywhere? if so what did you learn, not learn, need to know?

My motto is a good question with good specs deserves a Better Answer. A poor one deserves to be deleted or revised with assistance to a weblink on how to ask a question

Added Recently

• Arguments: I say No stupid questions, only uneducated facts, uneducated reasoning and hence uncertain or incorrect conclusions hence what appears to be a DUMB QUESTIONS is merely person's inability to understand the Laws of Physics AND Logic are necessary to ask a better question.

  • Users appear dumber than most (in any field), because of the following reasons;
  • they don't know the answer for sure, at all or even close
  • they have inadequate experience of what works, fails or is even close
  • to know what Theorems, Examples or solutions exist or Answers to Questions
  • Assumptions:

  • Electronics and Engineering are defined an "Applied Science" or application of laws of physics and logic (easily proven)

  • The best assumptions are the Laws of Logic and Physics.

  • Schematics Diagrams are called Logic Diagrams for a reason
  • The best Rules of False or BAD Logic are called Fallacies which have been provable like the Laws of Physics by Aristotle, Plato and others.
  • There are 44 Rules of Bad Logic or Fallacies. Aristotle defined them
  • You may know one of them" argumentum ad hominem" which originally meant appealing to the person's favoritism or weakness, for agreement but now also the converse which is not always true by laws of logic but is equated true for this phrase, No Personal Attack, not same as to prove in court unworthy of trust, but rather slander)
  • The more we understand; the less we know, since we realize there is so much more to learn. This is wisdom, not getting dumb.