Language Problems

Question

I only recently joined this community, however it strikes me how many questions appear to be mostly about words. Often, the person who's asking seems to do so in an unclear formulation. I sometimes tried to get down to the definitions or not answer directly, but in a way that might explain the question a little better without actually giving the solution. How do you work with such questions?

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Added examples:

Oversampling in OFDM (note the topic line)

Checking if u[n] and v[n] are orthogonal (Here, the poster appears to be asking for a definition, but the Text is cluttered and the Question is not very clear)

https://dsp.stackexchange.com/questions/14475/segmenting-audio-file-considering-time

https://dsp.stackexchange.com/questions/14482/low-pass-filter-in-frequency-domain

Answer 1

I don't think there's very much we can do, except try to edit these. If there's a reasonable question written by a non-English speaker, help them bring it into a comprehendible form. This is not a problem that will go away, since, as has been pointed out many times, the language of good science is bad English.

I would suggest the following:

1. If the language makes sense, but grammar is poor, edit it.
2. If the question makes little sense because of grammar, ask for clarification.
3. If no clarification is provided, by all means vote to close it.

Certainly, one of the biggest problems we need to resolve here is the percentage of answered questions. If questions are in a form that cannot be answered, we should close them. They won't help anyone else anyway.