Thoughts on meta post on homework question handling and basic questions

Question

I spend most of my time on the TeX.SE and venture to other SE sites when looking for help. However, the atmosphere here seems to be going the way of the "old" stackoverflow SE. By old, I mean about 5months or so ago. SO was becoming extremely hostile and unfriendly to those trying to learn programming and asking basic questions. Instead of directing new members to duplicate questions or helping them understand the rules and that they should use search feature first, they were being mistreated in the comments and down voted to oblivion which can prevent them from asking questions. However, SO finally changed their course and it has become a better place to ask questions for beginners and those not as skilled in programming in my eyes. You can go through their meta to see the many discussions on rampant hostility from that time.

I have been skimming through physics meta and have seen an unsettling trend. Post on banning homework type questions, no basic questions, we want conceptually higher level questions only, etc, etc. This how it started on their meta. What do we do about this question or that. It just perpetuates the anger and it boils over from the members more skilled in physics to those trying to learn.

I hope this isn't route physics.SE is looking to take.

Answer 1

I guess there isn't really a question to answer here but it's more of a discussion thing than anything else.

The idea behind each Stack setting its own policies is that each one can be tailored to a specific community, and that community establishes its own guidelines and procedures. And, as different members come and go, the community adapts and the policies adapt accordingly.

The arguments made on Meta here are very repetitive and common and despite all the discussion, our policies and actions tend to remain pretty consistent. There are two camps -- those who come in and want help on homework problems and think that we should be answering every question that comes in and those who want to outlaw all basic questions or things that are not very high level or specialized in advanced content. The two extremes are very vocal while it tends to be the trend of the majority to take a more even approach.

Both sides have their points but ultimately it is up to the community to decide what kind of community they want. The tendency to ban homework questions is grounded in trying to keep the community that is here happy. Many (not all, but many) of the people who drop in to ask homework questions are only looking for a quick answer and have no desire to participate in the community. They ask their very specific question, get an answer, never accept answers or vote and then disappear until they need another homework question answered. These people have no intention of being part of the community and so we don't look highly upon their questions, and we actively do what we can to suppress them.

The argument made by those who only want high level, advanced questions is that homework questions "drown" out the "good" questions and they have to sort through the 500th question on why F = ma and they miss the questions they are interested in. Personally, I don't buy into this since there's ways to sort and search by tags etc.. But there is some validity to how they feel.

On the other hand, only taking very specialized questions limits to people who are interested in, or capable of, participating. And small communities like that don't function well within the Stack Exchange universe. But the people who want this say "Who cares what SE wants, we want our community!" The solution, whether they like it or not, is to go make their own community because this place just won't work that way. And they have made efforts to go do that.

So coming back to your main point. If you read the posts on Meta and the arguments, it's easy to think we're all a bunch of jerks who are mean and blast people into oblivion. But (now anyway, there is a lot of drama surrounding the topic of politeness on our site), we are actually relatively friendly. Yes, we will downvote homework questions and vote to close them (I did both on your most recent question). But we will not tolerate attacks on people, nor will we post comments on homework questions insulting people etc.. That is not okay.

Our hostility is not very hostile, but when it is, it's confined to Meta (usually) and it's directed between experienced people here (typically). And mostly it's because we know each other. On the main site, when people post things that break policies, the majority of the experienced users are very civil. The anger and hostility usually starts with people who are not part of the community who get upset about the downvote, or upset about a question being put on hold, etc.. And they get upset and start lashing out because the site doesn't work the way they want it.

I said it in chat before and I'll say it again now -- for some reason, on the internet in general, but specifically on the Stacks -- there is a mentality where people show up to play in our sandbox and then get really angry with how we play in our sandbox and tell us we should do it their way. But the thing is, SE as a whole and each Stack specifically, isn't designed to cater to every person on the internet. It's designed to generate high quality questions with high quality answers from experts.

And our experience is that the vast majority of homework-like questions are not high quality. And the vast majority of people asking those questions do not become high quality members of the community. There are ways to phrase homework-like questions so they are on topic, and high quality, and useful to others. And that's what we're looking for. And we will help those who want to get to that point.

So your question on non-linear springs for example, if you could explain the steps you took and why you think those are the right steps from a physics standpoint, we would keep it open. We would be able to say "Well, you assumed X is physically correct but the physics say Y" which would lead you to your answer. But just putting an equation and saying "I don't know where to start" doesn't help you, it doesn't help (or interest) our members, and the answer won't help anybody other than you. Whereas, breaking down to the physics of your question and why you think a spring force should work a certain way, will help others who may be confused about their spring problem.

Answer 2

The word community gets mentioned over and over in these discussions, and for me that is essential feature of the Physics SE.

I was a teenage SciFi reading physics nerd back in the early 70s just about the time the Standard Model was reaching its final form. This was a fantastically exciting time, but if you lived in a small town in rural Somerset there was no-one to talk to about it. No-one.

So if a newcomer to the site wants to ask a basic question I will go to some trouble to write a detailed answer. This doesn't just mean answering their question, but maybe exploring related physics and trying to show what's so interesting about the physics behind it. I was going to cite a couple of such answers, but looking through my answers there are so many answers of this type it hardly seems pulling out one or two as examples.

The point is that I have to believe you're¹ really interested in the problem, and you'll be interested enough to read my answer and take it further by doing your own research. Since I can't read your mind I have to go by what you wrote in your question. That means your question has to show me you've thought about the problem and tried to Google it yourself, and that you're only asking here because you've come to a dead end. If this is the case then I don't care how basic your question is: if I think I can provide an interesting and informative answer then I will. Hopefully as you learn more about physics you'll start answering other people's questions yourself - there are plenty of examples on the site of this happening.

Now I appreciate I'm on the evangelist wing of this community, but while I suspect many members will regard my views as a little naive I suspect the vast majority agree with the basic principle. If you're interested and prepared to put some effort in we won't turn you away.

The flip side of this is that if you can't be arsed² then neither can I.

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¹ this the royal you, not you personnally

² © dmckee, 2014 - I thought this was a British expression. Shouldn't you colonials be saying can't be assed? :-)

Answer 3

The bulk of the users of this site have consistently voted for a site that is welcoming to beginners provided that they are able to frame their questions in a physicist-like way. That is, the site is welcoming to beginning scientists, but not to students who have not yet begun to think like physicists.

There is nothing new about this, it's been this way for two and a half years or more.

Please don't overlook the fact that the re-re-re-"can we be nicer to the noobs" movement on Stack Overflow (which comes up every 18-24 months)¹ wasn't about changing the rules about what was allowed, it was about changing the nature of the comments and improving the close-reason texts.

Stack Overflow is not accepting of "teach me to program" type questions, so it is neither strange nor exceptional that Physics SE is not particularly accepting of "help me with my physics 101 homework" questions. To be sure Math SE is friendly to their equivalent of such questions, but that's a different choice and it generates a different (to my mind less useful) kind of site.

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¹ It is, perhaps, worth exploring why the comments drift toward hostile over time and need an occasional course adjustment. Stack Overflow (and to a lesser extent, Physics SE) has become a premiere, go-to resource for help in it's domain. Not surprisingly, that attracts the attentions of everybody, including the vast hoards of people who can't be arsed to do any work for themselves.

The result is predictable: a large fraction of the questions asked are of very low quality and are often duplicates. Maintaining a high quality site means that these things must be dealt with and on Stack Exchange sites most of that burden falls on users with 3000+ reputation.

Those users see examples of a couple-dozen types are no-effort questions and questions from people whose preparation isn't up to meeting the minimum requirements of the site over and over and over and over. This is frustrating and from time to time someone takes it out on a new poster. It's not really fair because usually this poster hasn't disobeyed the basic rules dozens of times, but none-the-less he or she is part of a hoard that is (generally unintentionally) attacking the quality of the site. The attack is real, it has the potential to destroy the value of the site, and it goes on day in and day out without let up. So the frustration is real too.

Learning to handle it without exploding is a process.