Why is there no "noob land"? [duplicate]

Question

To start off please don't misinterpret the question.

I understand that Stack Overflow is meant to be a forum for professionals looking to get serious professional help, but I feel as if you are leaving out a whole group of people. While I may have a biased opinion being a student and not knowing nearly as much as your users I see a good deal of almost attacks against users new to field of computers and other things Stack Overflow is associated with.

A good deal of these users are posting legitimate questions that they can't find answers to and are getting almost assaulted by responses of "did you even research this" and other things making them feel like they are incompetent. The reality of the situation however is that these people sometimes don't know they've found the answer or are looking to see if there is someone out there that can explain it in a way that is less confusing.

One of the biggest positives about forums like these with people answering questions like those is they generally rephrase the answer in a less professional way that makes it easier to grasp the concepts of these ideas. Personally one of the most annoying these I have ever had happen is when doing a personal project attempting to understand some of the abilities of C++ I had people posting about how they we're just going to do my homework for me. The thing was it wasn't homework. I was a person attempting to get a better understanding of a language I didn't fully understand.

To fix the problem of these people being brutally shunned out of the community for questions that the professionals regard as "too stupid", "not worth there time", "not researched fully" or even just "plain old too basic", is there another Stack Exchange site for new people such as students or hobbyists where they won't be judged for not knowing things and they can get help without being shunned?

Please take this idea with an open mind and attempt to understand how frustrating it is to see a very valuable resource that will allow you to understand a complex idea and then be shunned out of it simply because the idea was to elementary.

Also - Sometimes people have put in research but they want to hear the ideas of other see what the recommend because these people usually have more experience and can say things like "Well this book while it looks good is extremely useless yet this one was wonderful". These may be opinions but they are also very useful to those that need guidance.

From what I see here this idea might not be taken well but I do believe he is correct and this problem needs to be addressed.

Answer 1

Ignoring all of the potential arguments about what such new users should or should not be doing, there is a major problem with your proposal:

Most high-quality contributors would quite simply avoid that area like the plague. The overall quality in that area would be horrid, because of the lack of standards. Instead of 'training' new users how to use the site, it would 'train' new users how to not use the site - and probably just teach them that the site isn't really any better than some random forum.

Answer 2

Andrew already posted the main reason that a "Stack Overflow for n00bs" just wouldn't work, but there are a few things in your post that I also want to address.

A good deal of these users are posting legitimate questions that they can't find answers to and are getting almost assaulted by responses of "did you even research this" and other things making them feel like they are incompetent.

Asking "did you even research this?" is not an assault. It's often a perfectly reasonable response to a question that's easily answered by Googling or by looking in the assigned text book. If "what have you tried?" needs to be asked, then the OP just needs to show what research they've done. They don't need to go somewhere else.

To fix the problem of these people being brutally shunned out of the community for questions that the professionals regard as "too stupid", "not worth there time", "not researched fully" or even just "plain old too basic", is there another Stack Exchange site for new people such as students or hobbyists where they won't be judged for not knowing things and they can get help without being shunned?

People are not being "brutally shunned" for one bad question. If you ask a n00bish question, nobody is going to hold it against you when you ask your next, well-researched question. Only people who exhibit a pattern of repeatedly asking questions that get down-voted, closed, and deleted are actually banned from asking questions again. Giving those people another place to ask questions seems counter-productive to the goals of Stack Overflow (increase signal-to-noise ratio, make the Internet better, etc.).

Answer 3

It pretty much depends on what you mean by being "noob friendly".

People (which may also include you) tend to confuse things. If you make a simple question, which has a simple answer, and the answer couldn't be found everywhere then your question is legitimate. If instead you ask a simple question, which has a simple answer, and this answer could be found with a simple research, then you shouldn't have asked the question.

This means that if the problem is not based on a question it is too simple or those who ask it lack knowledge. It's not simple->closed, instead it is no research->closed .

You can even replace "simple" with "hard" and that is still valid.

There some who confuse this concept, from both sides (answerers and askers). One may think : "I have asked a simple question and they've closed it", on the other side one may think: "I closed this question because it's too basic". They would both be wrong, sadly it often happens. Some people are too biased, and this is regularly associated with it being simple or too short, or too generic question with an off topic question. What you should do is just to comment, if you see that your question was legitimate, so that you did search things before asking it. If they close it as a duplicate, don't get too angry because of this, it may happens from time to time. Asking a duplicate question isn't said to be "symptom" of no research, because it may happen that you asked it with a different title from the duplicate one, so also searching with Google that problem wouldn't lead to the duplicate question. In this case accept it, and go to see the duplicate question. If the question doesn't satisfy your needs, ask to reopen it saying that the duplicate question wasn't enough to answer to your doubts. Post here if you need to debate over a closed question.

As for the last thing you ask, I think that this is the right place for asking questions even from newbies. Just ask it in a certain form, always search before asking, show your efforts and you'll be replied. Even simplest questions get an answer on this site if they're written correctly.