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Questions are meant to show at least a minimal effort to research. I came across one of these questions when reviewing the triage queue. The author hadn't made any effort and just posted two really vague and open-ended sentences.

How should this have been handled? Is Needs Improvement the correct choice? None of the options to flag under unsalvageable seemed to be a correct reason to close the question, but it would not have been a valid question just from some minor edits. I'm not entirely sure what happens after you select Needs Improvement though.

Also I am not sure if I should have tagged this question with support instead.

I've seen the comment

If the OP is the only one that can improve it, clicking should be improved is incorrect

by Kevin B on this question. Is that actually the answer I am looking for? Should one of the unsalvageable options have been correct after all?

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  • Why wouldn't the option unclear what you're asking not fly under Unsalvageable? The notice added once closed link to the help topic on How to Ask which would explain perfectly what the OP needs to do to get the question re-opened. And as you found your self, only click 'Needs Improvement' if a reviewer in the H&I queue can do something about it...
    – rene
    Commented Aug 8, 2015 at 12:44
  • link to the question, to which you are talking about
    – HaveNoDisplayName
    Commented Aug 8, 2015 at 12:45
  • I didn't realise I could look at my review history until now. Was sbi the right option for the original post of this: stackoverflow.com/posts/31892948/revisions or this: stackoverflow.com/questions/31893005/…?
    – Nick Cardoso
    Commented Aug 8, 2015 at 12:56
  • Also for this one: stackoverflow.com/questions/31892978/… I thought, the question makes sense but it appears they've made no effort to look at what they could do themselves, but it's been upvoted. Was it the right option in this case?
    – Nick Cardoso
    Commented Aug 8, 2015 at 12:58

1 Answer 1

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Lack of research is the cause of many problems, but not necessarily a problem in and of itself. Critically, many very useful questions do not show much in the way of research, either because they were asked at a time when no productive research was possible for the topic (new API) or because they were since edited to remove irrelevant details ("canonical" questions).

So keep your eyes open for the problems that can be caused by a lack of research:

  1. Duplicates: at least one of your examples suffers from this - I found a link to a matching question near the top of the list of related questions! Searching for these in Triage is not expected, but if you recognize a duplicate then choose Unsalvageable and mark it as such.

  2. Overly-broad questions can result from insufficient time spent breaking down a problem. Sometimes these can be salvaged, but for extremely broad topics or questions that consist of multiple, tangential parts (folks posting multi-part assignments for instance) it is expedient to choose Unsalvageable -> Should be closed -> Too Broad.

  3. Ill-defined questions can result from a lack of time spent researching the problem, or from simple carelessness; distinguishing between the two is a waste of your time. If the problem statement is severely lacking in detail (or omitted entirely) or concerns specific logic without actually including this logic, then close it as "Unclear what you're asking". Another one of your examples suffered from this until it was edited.

  4. Brief, specific questions are... not inherently problematic. While these may not show much in the way of research, unless they are clearly duplicates they are not unsalvageable - indeed, they may not even need any improvement.

    Ironically, one of the symptoms of doing a lot of research is a question that is very, very specific and free of extraneous detail... Be careful not to penalize these questions when they do not exhibit any other problematic symptoms. Mark them as "should be improved" if they lack a clearly-written title or suffer from other minor issues; otherwise, select Looks OK. Your last example falls into this category.

See also: Should Stack Overflow (and Stack Exchange in general) be awarding "A"s for Effort?

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    The war wages on against "what have you tried?" commenters and other people who want to impose a standard of 'research' that would render all but highly-localised, highly-useless debugging questions off-topic. As ever, I support your efforts to make people apply standards that encourage useful content rather than punishing the askers of precise, broadly-applicable questions that could help others because they didn't make a sufficient display of morally virtuous (but pointless) effort.
    – Mark Amery
    Commented Aug 9, 2015 at 17:20

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