Can we require that questions contain a question mark to nudge users to ask explicit questions?

Question

During review I come across “question” posts that don't actually contain a question. In some cases the question is implied in a statement. In either case it would be better to have an explicit question.

Proposition:

1. Mandate at least one question mark per question post (outside of quotation and pre-formatted listing environments).

2. Notify users of this requirement when they fail to comply with a short explanation, possibly with a link to “How do I ask a good question?”.

If (1.) is too strong, as a variant we could remove the mandate but still do (2.) and ask question authors to confirm that they don't want to use a single question mark.

Rationale:

This is no sure-fire way to reject non-question question posts but it serves to direct the attention of question authors as to the lack of an explicit request and guide them to use Ask Ubuntu as a Q&A site as intended.

I'm not trying to enforce “proper punctuation”; that undertaking would be entirely in vain. Instead I would like use the absence of even a single question mark as an indicator that the author didn't ask an explicit question because they are unaware of or misunderstood the Q&A model of AU/SE.

Answer 1

A strict mandate would not be effective and would possibly be harmful for the reasons pointed out by @ByteCommander in this comment.

My gut reaction is that I could certainly get behind the idea of automating notifying users with a short explanation, with a link to “How do I ask a good question?” as I've lost count of how many times I've encouraged a user to do just that, however in order to make that determination I'd have to actually read the question and at least make an attempt to understand it.

This is a task that's exceedingly hard to do programmatically as humans are still better as sifting through this stuff than code is. There are a number of related questions on how to handle these non-questions on meta.stackexchange.com and after sifting through them I think the most related example is Should non-questions be rewritten as questions? I understand that it's more fun to answer questions than to play janitor and attempt to improve posts like you describe, but it's a necessary task.

In situations such as you mention here, what I try to do is at least point them toward https://askubuntu.com/help/how-to-ask and if I think I get the gist of it, take my best shot at converting it to a question and drop a comment suggesting that the OP revise it if I've misinterpreted them.

While on the surface it appears that using the absence of a single question mark as a trigger could be useful, I think the number of "false positives" could easily outweigh the usefulness of such an approach. For instance the statement "I can't set my script as executable" has no question mark, and clearly isn't a good question but it's pretty clear what the problem is. I don't think we'd have a problem pointing them in the right direction.