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I have seen this many times and experienced it myself as well.
When a new member asks a question,
As far as I can see, what happens most of the time is everyone down-votes the question, also maybe flags it instead of correcting the situation or leaving a comment as necessary.
Can the moderators get involved in this situation and do something more appropriate?
What is the best possible action that can be taken here?
Personally I always try to edit obviously-first posts to tidy them up, rather than just downvoting and moving on - grammar, spelling, phrasing and layout - to as close to the de facto house style as I can. IMHO this:
Let me be a contrarian and state that the vast majority of the downvotes on poorly written first questions by new users have been deserved. There are several things in a question that will attract downvotes like flies:
Any developer with any common sense will know not to ask something containing one or more of these elements. This is not something that we should have to train new members on, because this kind of behavior is not acceptable in any professional forum or mailing list. Quite frankly, in almost every case that I've commented and explained why they got downvoted for doing this, they kept right on asking bad questions in the same way.
As Jeff has stated, "the world is awash in questions" and we can afford to be selective of what's allowed here in order to maintain a high signal to noise ratio as the site grows. If someone wants to have their question be treated well, they can put in a little effort when asking.
However, this doesn't mean we should be jerks about how we treat newcomers. We should be polite, professional, and provide constructive criticism to those who are open to improving. If there's a good core question that is roughly worded, you're right in that we should edit it to expose the quality content. I've edited nearly 1500 posts, and one of the most rewarding things on the site is to watch an edited question reverse from being downvoted to massively upvoted.
Downvotes, close votes, and the quality filters exist for a reason. I feel that removing the penalty for downvoting questions, the addition of the automatic question ban for repeat offenders, and the expansion of the close votes and tools has led to a noticeable improvement in the quality of the site over the last year.
Can the moderators involve in this situation and do something more appropriate
I don't think that the moderators can keep up with those questions and I don't think its their job (at least not their most importants task)
What is the best possible action that can be taken here.
Edit the question, format as good as possible and add the needed tags when they can be determined from the text/title or source code. (You will get the honor of several badges, or even reputation (for an approved edit, if you are below 2000 rep) if you follow this rule)
There's nothing moderators can do about down-votes, but they could decline flags that simply indicate that it's low quality, but probably won't.
There are a lot of flags being raised - particularly on Stack Overflow - and moderators don't have the time to go into great detail checking posts to see if it's just the poor spelling and grammar that are causing the down-votes.
It's up to individuals to do their bit by editing posts (see Mark's answer) and disputing flags where they think this is the only problem with the post.
Moderators should be exception handlers, dealing with the stuff that the community can't deal with itself.
I assume that this problem is exactly what the "Review / First Questions" option is there for. I'm not sure if this is visible to all users or if you have to have a certain amount of reputation, so maybe you haven't seen it?
It gives a list of first questions, you can filter it down to the specific tags you are interested in, you can then go through and edit, comment, up/down vote all from one screen. I'd consider the community regularly using this page to be "the best possible action that can be taken here?" - it is even encouraged by badges.
Very glad you posted this as down voting "newbie's" questions is a particular peeve of mine. I feel that the correct action to be taken here is to format the question correctly; correcting spelling, grammar and coding where necessary.
This prevents any animosity from new users whose questions have been voted down and informs them of the correct way to ask and format questions for the future.
I think your assumption that we need more new users to ask terribly questions is demonstrably false.
StackOverflow has....
SO does not need users who are incapable of forming a coherent question without having their hand held. We are not hurting for new users. We are hurting for GOOD new users.
This is not a social networking site where we want to encourage everyone to be the best they can be and coach them through writing good questions and doing their own research.
This is a Q and A site that gets 3 new questions a minute all day. If a few of those new people get their feelings hurt because they posted bad content then we don't really need them.
I want a button labeled:
remove this question from public view and let me work on it for ten minutes
Sometimes questions have been voted to oblivion and closed and well on their way to deletion just because the questioner only knows French, or didn't know how to format their post so the HTML is visible to more than just the browsers.
I'm occasionally willing to take ten minutes to fix up a question that would normally be evaporated, and I'd like the question to stand on the merits of my improvements to it. The FGITW "problem" is usually awesome at getting questioners some answers quickly and making sure spam never lives more than four or five minutes, but when people without a good grasp of English ask good questions, FGITW can doom a question to a horrible death before I've had a chance to work on it.
