What constitutes a 'lack of research effort' on IPS?

Question

This started with this question and a few of the comments there: How do you communicate efficiently with someone who is stuttering?

One of our community members wrote a good answer to that question, listing the do's and don'ts of communicating with a stutterer. (link to deleted answer)

The OP of that question left a not so nice comment underneath that answer, stating that this answer was taken from a specific website and that there should be a link. Now, I don't want to argue about linking to sources here, since there is an etiquette for that here (which wasn't followed in this case).

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It was what happened next that I would like to get cleared up. There were several comments, now deleted, so I'll have to do this by memory:

• The said answerer commented under the question asking 'what general advice on the internet wasn't helpful to the OP'.
• The OP replied that SE has it as their mission to be a place for all general advice on the internet, and reinstated in a kinder way that the answer wasn't wrong, just lacking a source.
• And then there's another comment reacting to that stating that questions on SE do require some research effort, instead of asking people to post the contents of the internet onto SE.

This to me indicates some sort of hypothetical question situation, where the OP isn't actually struggling with the communication but is just curious. This feeling get's stronger by looking at the sheer amount of questions marks in that question.

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I did some research on this and:

• One of the reasons to downvote things is still 'shows a lack of research effort'.
• This meta.se post states that SO shouldn't turn down questions just because the answer is on google.
• The question itself doesn't mention a thing on what was already tried and what problem the tried solutions are presenting.

So, there are basically two things that are feeling as complete opposites to each other: We can downvote for lack of research effort, but we should also not be turning people down because the simple answer is on google.

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What does constitute a lack of research effort here on IPS?

Would that be when there's no mention of what was already tried/nothing tried already?

Would that be when the question is basically a 'let me google that for you' request?

When do we downvote stuff as 'lack of research effort' and when do we close stuff for 'lacking details on what's already tried'?

Answer 1

"Please include the research you’ve done" is one of the most commonly used close reason on ELU, and it is there to avoid getting flooded with too-basic questions that can easily be answered by looking up a random dictionary or thesaurus. Speaking for ELU, we do not want to take up the role of a dictionary service yet.

I believe some similar approach is taken on most other stacks and maybe on a less strict level, for example, on tech or science related sites, we expect the OP to tell us what possible solutions they have already tried so that we can avoid investing our time writing an answer to which then the OP would say, "but I already tried that, like, duh".

On IPS, I think the research requirement, if we're going to make it mandatory, should be the OP's current ideas on how to approach a matter and how they think it would not work, or what they've already tried and how it did not work.

I don't think we should force our users to do all the googling they can before asking here. Googling enough can solve almost all our SE questions. Instead, our aim is to become that top google result for other googlers.

Answer 2

Quoting my friend @NVZ from his earlier answer,

On IPS, I think the research requirement, if we're going to make it mandatory, should be the OP's current ideas on how to approach a matter and how they think it would not work, or what they've already tried and how it did not work. I don't think we should force our users to do all the googling they can before asking here.

__ That makes sense for IPS.SE @NVZ. May I also ask why the issue of "doing your research" was never raised here before this particular controversy broke out! In short we have never insisted that members should do their research before posting questions here.

But why didn't the issue arise earlier? I think 6 months is a good period for common problems to come up a few times. The "research" issue never came up before because members were asking highly personalised questions on interpersonal interactions and were not expected to "show their research."

The fact that the issue never arose before in the 6 months that IPS has been up and running tells me that "research" is not a necessary component for questions on IPS, just as our answers are validated by experience and not by references, unlike other sites on the SE network.

In fact that is the right policy for IPS which is in many ways unique among SE websites.

I do not consider that an isolated case necessitates newly applying principles of mandatory research from other SE sites, totally or partially to IPS. We can certainly monitor the situation to see if more such instances occur, and discuss accordingly.

Meanwhile we don't need to be too bothered about what constitutes "lack of research effort" when a question is asked at IPS.SE, and there is no need to downvote for that reason. We are mainly concerned when a question lacks details (including details of what solutions were already tried) to make it answerable in precise and helpful ways.

However, "lacking necessary details" was never formalized as a custom close reason because members felt that existing close reasons are sufficient for the purpose. If the question is too broad or it is 'unclear what you are asking', vote to put on hold until OP provides relevant and adequate details.