Should "questions" be questions?

Question

More than infrequently, opening posts on SO are not questions at all, in the very grammatical sense: They're just statements or vague musings (for instance this recent one), and it's not clear what exactly is being asked (since nothing is technically being asked).

I always feel that it shouldn't be our job to construct a question from someone's undirected ramblings, and so this is usually a NARQ candidate for me.

I was wondering if we could add a very simple check that would count the number of literal question marks in a post and refuse to accept it if there are none. This could be accompanied by a small note on what a question should look like.

What do you think? Should we add this feature?

Update: Since people seem to get hung up on the details, I'd like to clarify that an entirely satisfactory alternative would be to pop up an overridable notice with a warning, like "Hello, you appear to be writing a question. Would you like help?", with a "No thanks" button to dismiss it and submit the post regardless.

Update 2: If you disagree that absence of a question mark is a strong signal that the question is poor, could you please provide examples of good, useful and appropriate questions that do not contain question marks? I've provided several additional examples of when the signal works in the comments, and more come up regularly, so I would appreciate to see some evidence of the contrary.

Answer 1

No, I don't think we should be doing it.

It's possible to describe a problem and even a question with no question marks. "How do I do that?" Becomes "I'm currently looking for a way to do that".

The problem is usually with beginners (identified by low reputation or recent join date) not realizing that this isn't a forum, but a Q&A site, and that the problem should be very clear.

Perhaps a notice before posting for low reputation users, but I don't feel we should completely reject posts without question marks like that (Because then I'd just add a bunch without changing the content and be done with it).

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P.S. @LazyBadger, before you comment, yes, this is essentially the same suggestion as yours, but your reasoning and mine are different, I disagree with your reasoning. Users are expected to meet our quality standard, not the other way around.

Answer 2

StackOverflow isn't Jeopardy. Questions don't necessarily need to contain question marks to be understood and answered. I also think that questions shouldn't need to contain question marks to be postable.

If we turn them away completely by saying: "You didn't include a question mark so you can't post here", we're essentially saying "We don't want your kind here".

If instead, we allow new users who do not understand the system to post their "questions" and have community members point these users in the right direction, the system is more inviting, and gives the impression of "Thanks for giving it a go, we're all here to help you".

Certainly some users will never learn from their mistakes, and keep posting poor quality questions, but I would hazard a guess that they're in the minority. Questions that are good enough will be upvoted, and if there are improvements to be made that are worth making, members of the community are generally pretty good at stepping in and lending a hand. It's why SO is so useful. People actually help.

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Addressing Update 2:

If you disagree that absence of a question mark is a strong signal that the question is poor, could you please provide examples of good, useful and appropriate questions that do not contain question marks?

I hold my judgement on whether there is any correlation between the absence of a question mark and the quality of the post. The onus is on you to prove that there is a correlation via evidence. In the absence of any evidence, I cannot say one way or another.

I've provided several additional examples of when the signal works in the comments, and more come up regularly, so I would appreciate to see some evidence of the contrary.

You have provided anecdotal evidence, which neither strengthens nor weakens your argument. Asking for more anecdotal evidence is not an appropriate way to proceed in bolstering any argument.

If it's simply evidence that you want, it would be appropriate to query the SO archives for the data:

All questions should be broken down by two categories into four groups based on their first draft (remember, this whole issue is to address the initial posting of a question, not the subsequent revising).

The categories are:

• Questions with first drafts that contained question mark characters vs those that did not
• Open questions vs Closed questions

The groups are:

• Questions with first drafts that contained question mark characters (?) and are still open
• Questions with first drafts that did not contain question mark characters (?) and are still open
• Questions with first drafts that contained question mark characters (?) and are now closed
• Questions with first drafts that did not contain question mark characters (?) and are now closed

If you can provide evidence* that the lack of a question mark character in a first draft strongly correlates to the question being closed, then I will be more than happy to delete (or modify) this answer and create a new answer that supports your proposed change.

_{* Please also be sure to provide the steps you used when gathering the evidence so that we may reproduce it}

Answer 3

It can be notice, but must not be refusal. And, after all, "don't dictate me, how I write my texts!!!". Strong and strict management needed only for small kids, which isn't our case, isn't it?!

Count my voice "contra" idea in your current form.