Welcome to Software Development on Codidact!
Will you help us build our independent community of developers helping developers? We're small and trying to grow. We welcome questions about all aspects of software development, from design to code to QA and more. Got questions? Got answers? Got code you'd like someone to review? Please join us.
Comments on Give actionable feedback when closing questions
Parent
Give actionable feedback when closing questions
Having had the dubious honor of experiencing the closing process from the perspective of a question author, it seems to me that closing does not adequately communicate why the question was closed, and which aspects need improving in order to make the question work here.
Specifically, for feedback to be actionable, it needs to
- specifically identify the problem
- explain why it is a problem
- and ideally explain a way to move forward
So, how did our process measure up? The close reason given was:
This post contains multiple questions or has many possible indistinguishable correct answers or requires extraordinary long answers.
That lists 3 different reasons for closure, leaving it unclear which one applies to the question.
Also, the second possible reason is not conveyed clearly, because "many possible indistinguishable answers" does not make grammatical sense: if the answers are indistinguishable, they are duplicates - why is that a fault of the question?
And it doesn't explain why that is a problem.
And it most definitely doesn't show a way forward.
Of course, people are smart. They can ask for further information if they care, and then wait a day for that further information to arrive.
I did, and received:
I closed this post because it's asking for personal anecdotes; there's an infinite number of possible answers to such a question, and as such doesn't fit so well into a Q&A format. It might be better suited to chat, or possibly a series of blog posts (which you might want to discuss in the Meta category). See also How to ask a great question in the Help Center.
That's much better:
- It clearly identifies the problem.
- It attempts to explain why it is a problem (but doesn't quite succeed, because it doesn't explain why "many answers" make a question "a bad fit for Q&A")
- It attempts to show a way forward (but doesn't quite succeed: why chat? how do I blog? Does he mean the currently disabled article feature?)
but it also shows how challenging it can be to communicate and explain site policy in a comment box. And how time consuming. And that's probably why Mythical gave that link to the help center. Alas, as the "how to ask" page does not appear to mention "many answers" at all, the link didn't help me much ...
So ... can we find a better way to give feedback when closing a question?
Post
To expand on my comment somewhat...
In a question and answer format, personal questions like "What do you personally think?" don't tell to fare too well. There's not really any way to identify right or wrong answers. It's very hard to vote on the quality of answers, because it's asking for personal opinions (or in this anecdotes). You can have 1,000 different answers, and no real way to sort them by "quality" - because the question doesn't focus on a specific, actionable question; it's asking for everybody to chip in to a discussion.
To me, this doesn't seem like a good fit for the Q&A format.
In the Help Center, I was specifically thinking of this paragraph:
Avoid too much subjectivity
Questions like "What's your favorite way to eat an egg?" can't be answered objectively - the answer, naturally, changes depending on who you ask. On the other hand, "What's the difference between hard-boiled eggs and an omelette?" can be answered without relying too much on personal opinions. Try to ask questions that can be answered with some level of objectivity.
I suggested chat simply because that's currently the "laid back" area, where you don't have to worry about sticking to any sort of Q&A format.
When I suggested possibly a series of blog series, I was indeed referring to a category of articles that doesn't currently exist. (That's why I mentioned bringing it up here on Meta.)
I was thinking that a series of blog posts, by various authors, about "the worst code I've ever seen episode #6" would be a good way of sharing the (useful) knowledge that would have been contained in the question that was closed, just in a format more suited to it. (If there's interest in setting something like that up, a new Meta post about it is probably the way to go.)
I absolutely agree that the canned closed reasons need to be reworked. As @Moshi mentioned, it's in the pipeline for being revamped entirely.
And as a last point, it's entirely possible that I was in the wrong closing the question; I realized afterwards that I was largely operating on instincts brought over from Stack. Sorry about that! It's entirely possible that the Software Dev community here will decide that they want to keep that type of question around. If that's the case, the question can definitely be reopened, but that's probably a community-specific discussion that needs to happen.
1 comment thread