I think we need to strike a delicate balance here:
- be welcoming to people, because, hey, that's what we're here for
- keep the platform functional (and that means sufficient-quality questions only)
I often go ahead and read a newbie question, and then pretty much immediately decide to close-vote it. That sounds incredibly harsh, but it's not: as new users, you don't even see the close vote count, AND, and that's more important here, I try to check back on the question within a few hours and see if things improved (close votes can easily be retracted).
Of course, improvement seldom happens spontaneously in this causality-centric reality, so I try to leave (hopefully helpful) comments. For example, a question that was
I would like to know the best audio-water marking technique with below
operations,
- Add some audio-water marking in my WAV files (PCM samples) & store
- Do some processing like, equalization & volume/gain updating etc.
- Compare (1) & (2) to ensure integrity of audio content
Also what is the complexity & typical memory requirement (I need this
for an embedded device)
would get a comment
Hi! Welcome here. I'd like to help you improve your first question for maximum effect. Let's take this apart: "The best" according to which metric? You can't say "the best car" without saying with respect to what (top speed,max load,fuel consumption,number of cup holders…). Then: Audio watermarking really is a broad topic and you can find very many, even beginner-friendly, resources using google, so we need to expect you to do a bit of your own research. My wild guess is that you've done quite some research (you did end up here, somehow,didn't you?). So, tell us what you've found out so far!
That's admittedly one of my explicitly more nice first comments.
Does this kind of thing work, where I do the following:
- Identify shortcoming of new question
- Close-Vote as appropriate per previous point
- Leave Comment, encouraging improvement, often even in very simple terms (real-world analogies etc)
Often yes, but in the general case: not quite sure.
Of course, as said, people who are actively actually looking for solutions to a problem that they've really tried to investigate as well as they could are typically very positive about feedback and questions for clarification.
In the case above, the last two questions of OP were practically my indicator for "there likely won't be anything coming out of this".
We do have a lot of people that really try to avoid reading that book chapter and hope that we, upon being triggered by the right buzzwords, just magically funnel knowledge without effort of their own right into their cortex. I doubt that this typically is as consciously explicit as I just stated it! I instead assume that a lot of people simply are rather stressed when they come here, simply because signal processing is among the more math-y things they'll do and the work load of getting to grips with a chapter is very much having understood all the basic definitions leading up to that chapter; which more often than not means "basically all previous chapters" in their textbook. Since they don't (feel like they) have the time, they hope for shortcuts.
I think it's questionable we need to embrace these shortcut-seekers as is – simply because that leaves no positive impact on us, on the site (simplifying answers is what they seek, not correct ones), and questionable impact on them.
What we need to embrace is their potential to convert a "do my understanding for me" into a specific "I have a lack of understanding for this, how can I change that?".
So, what needs to happen is that we more clearly say
Hi! Welcome here. The way you ask this might mean you're having a hard time understanding your question's basics and hope we can give you a more concise answer than your literature research could do for you. We're afraid that's not the case. However, if you can rephrase your question to be like: "I need to solve {PROBLEM}, and for that I need to understand {ASPECT}" with the first ASPECT you encounter (don't be shy!) that you don't understand, you'll be getting forward in no time!
and really mean it. I don't object to answering easy, small questions, and if it is by citing definitions, if these are sufficiently researched.
The idea is that rewarding doing the decomposition of their problem into smaller questions that can individually be answered, maybe even by themselves, will lead to more questions asked after sufficient thought has been given, and the answers to these will encourage these askers to ask more, increasingly complex-but-well-researched (as opposed as complex and unresearched) questions.
That comes at two expenses:
- If we need to encourage breaking down questions until each question asked occurs to even the asker as fundamental, then there's no "too easy" questions anymore.
I'm guilty of thinking those exist myself (example comment). Even if its just asking for a wikipedia'ble definition, we can't just downvote and move on, but need to feed back "hey, did you try looking for this on wikipedia?", and only after that downvote.
- We need to really be more clear with what we "demand". (we offer free services, and recommend people do something so that we can, but it still feels like a demand to many of those asking)
That means actually writing
Hey, I know this might seem harsh, but I had to downvote your question because it just dumps a complete homework problem on us, without even trying to identify what's hard for you, and what you can do; that really gives us nothing we can answer without writing a whole book. Give us the first thing that you need help with, and we'll try to help you. (Please do so by specifying that as a question by editing your post.)
I think that the frankness here is a feature. There will be users who get cross at us for "refusing to do our job", but let's be honest here: We don't have to help everyone, and our (as in: important answerers on this site) mental state does influence our willingness and ultimately our ability to help.
