Should we downvote questions when the OP didn't put any research effort into them?

Question

For instance: How to install bind dns server and apache web server in ubuntu?.

There is certainly a lot of how-tos to be found for exactly this task, it looks like we are his first (and only) resource. I know that the mouse-over names this as one reason for downvoting, but I don't think it has been handled this way since I am aboard.

What got me thinking along these lines was a sentence from Eliah ("We actually need way more downvoting, not less.") in his answer to http://meta.askubuntu.com/questions/7179/could-we-add-a-delay-before-being-able-to-downvote-a-question.

Of course a downvote must/should be accompanied by a comment informing what the OP should do to improve the question.

Answer 1

Of course!

The tooltip of down arrow (for questions) says, and I quote:

This question don't show any research effort; it is unclear or not useful.

We shouldn't extract all the information to OP's in comments, at very least they should make an effort: that they did investigate, or tried to fix, or at least made the question answerable without the furtherance or with just few comments to find out. The same apply to questions that are answerable without having to take a gun and pointing to OP's head to narrow down what the question is about! Those could be voted up!

Example of good questions that were interesting, and didn't need comments to make clear what the question is about... just look for them: https://askubuntu.com/questions?sort=votes

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I don't say just downvote for the sake of it, but at least they know that several downvotes + 1 comment means that they should review what their peers are asking them to do (in the comment) and do it.

Answer 2

Do not lightly downvote salvageable content or dupes, please!

Ever since we started this discussion here we can observe a significant increase in down voting. This is done far more often on questions than on answer, presumably because downvoting questions does not cost you any of your own reputation.

Some of the down votes are well thought and justified, but it is my feeling that this is far not always the case. We can see quite a few questions where downvotes were cast even before the OP had any chance to respond to comments or improve their questions.

Let me quote from the guidelines for downvoting in the Stackexchange network:

• Use your downvotes whenever you encounter an egregiously sloppy, no-effort-expended post, or an answer that is clearly and perhaps dangerously incorrect.
• The up-vote privilege comes first because that's what you should focus on: pushing great content to the top. Down-voting should be reserved for extreme cases. It's not meant as a substitute for communication and editing.

As we may develop our own voting guide for Ask Ubuntu it is my believe that we should not go too far off the Stackexchange Network practise.

If we simply used the tooltip ("This question don't show any research effort; it is unclear or not useful.") as a guide we may prematurely vote down a question that will not fall into the categories "egregiously sloppy", "no-effort", or "extreme case". This will needlessly lead to confusion and irritation especially from new users. This may eventually lead to users not coming back, or not daring to ask again.

This is not what we want. We want to be a place open for new users. We therefore should help them to become better. This is to my strong believe better be done by

1. Edit
2. Ask for clarification
3. vote to close if the question meets a close reason which can not be resolved from an edit.

Use your downvotes only on questions that are really not worth any effort. This will then show others that this question is not worth to be read. But keep in mind: this will also affect probably good answers on that question.

In case you still felt like having to downvote a question for lack of details, or otherwise inappropriate content: Please do come back to see if the question was edited to be able to revert your downvote. This sadly does not happen too often.

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As per request here some examples of the last 30 days:

• How to make google chrome work after a host name change
  -3: Beginner who couldn't figure out what to do with an error message. They even came back and answered our questions from comments. Now at -3 it will be unlikely someone cares to read and help.

• Install libopencv-dev 32bit on 12.04 64bit
  -3: The OP needed help on broken packages with Multi Arch. We may not be able to resolve this but the question per se is neither sloppy nor effortless nor extreme.

• https://askubuntu.com/questions/338674/video-display-problems
  -3: An absolute Ubuntu novice is faced with severe video issues. They even posted a screenshot. The question needs more details alright, but it had downvotes without asking for clarification when I made my comment 5 hours after it was posted.

• https://askubuntu.com/questions/338675/what-are-some-good-low-spec-and-free-games
  +1/-4: This is an opinion based question - no debate - but it is clearly written and all information needed was given. Why not close it as dupe of the games question? This would not have led to these many auto-downvotes.

• What documentation and help resources are available for setting and examining UFW rules?
  -5: They asked for an API documentation but they chose a poor question title. What if we had edited the title to "Where do I find a documentation for UFW?". The question has an upvoted and accepted answer. By this it is now a downvote trap because the OP can not even delete it (even if they better edited the title IMO).

• https://askubuntu.com/questions/334939/can-i-try-out-ubuntu-without-deleting-windows
  +1/-8: This is only a dupe of almost the same question which has 32 upvotes.

• https://askubuntu.com/questions/335456/system-report-and-phishing-help
  -11: This is a poor question, no doubt. It was closed as NARQ which is fine. But why did that many downvotes follow then? Why don't we have a single "delete" vote up to now? This will not help anybody. In fact rewriting the question to something on how to perform penetration tests in Ubuntu would not be that bad, would it? Nobody will care to do that at this question's rate now.

Answer 3

If there is no sign of research effort and the question is not useful to the community because of the lack of research effort, then feel free to downvote.

There are useful questions to the community that nevertheless do not show research effort. You can downvote those if you like, but never close them. Remember, there's no lower threshold for research needed for questions. We want to keep questions that are useful to the community open to the community. Here are some examples:

• How do I install Steam on Ubuntu?
• How can I change the clock in GNOME from 24 hour format to 12 hour format, or vice-versa?
• How do I empty the trash folder?

If you feel that the questioner is being lazy, and you don't want to do the work of researching the answer for them, that's OK! Don't. Just leave the question open for members of the community who do want to contribute answers in this way.

We want answers to these questions on AskUbuntu, even if the answer is already elsewhere on the web, for many reasons.

Answer 4

I would caution that unless we know the person in real life, we really don't know if they've done any research or not. I say this not to be technical, but just to remind you that sometimes people just don't know... and in cases like that, leaving a comment (and waiting for a response) before taking an action such as down voting, is probably the best bet.

If the person has clearly not put in any effort when writing the question (for example, it is short and lacking any detail whatsoever), then I would suggest down voting (and I would highly recommend leaving a comment expressing why the question needed to be down voted, as otherwise you leave the OP none the wiser).

Answer 5

For me "OP didn't put any research effort" means that we know that a similar question with answer is already existing.

Then lets vote for CLOSE (if you have the privilege) for duplicate question
or FLAG

that way the owner will be redirected to the right question.

Whereas downvoting does not help anything