the concept of too broad, primarily opinion violation [duplicate]

Question

tl; dr: I was offended by 2 questions that got closed and reopened multiple times here and here.

Both of these questions got lots of downvotes, then got closed, then reopened, then upvoted, and so on. So, I wanted to understand the concept.

Theoretically: every question has an answer, somewhere on the Internet, the point is: what keywords should you use to fetch the answer.

Therefore: Broad questions are naturally hard to search on google, since most of time they are entry level questions of someone who has no clue what he's asking. That's what a Q&A site is there for (answer his question with a set of keywords, high quality links, books or whatever would help him start digging deeper and understand more about the topic).

In short, I think "off topic - too broad, primarily opinion based, poll question" is plaguing Stack Overflow: while questions like "how to slice an array in php?" are accepted, broad questions like "how can i become a professional php programmer" are closed and banned.

Let me clear this, the concept of asking in a Q&A website is to find an answer for a question that you could not find an answer for it on Google due to the difficulty of specifying an exact set of keywords that would return a high quality specific answers.

How to handle broad questions?

1. "you're asking about something called data modeling, try to google it"
2. "you can try googling Keywords like: ER DATA model, or XXXX in wonder land
3. "this book will allow you to understand"
4. "to summarize this broad questions google XXXX key words, and here is a short intro ..."

So, don't you agree that providing a service of answering google-hard questions is of a greater value than answering a specific question that is 99% exists in the documentation and you can get 1 million correct high quality specific answer for it just by googling your question title?

After all, if you cannot summarize an answer, then you don't have to answer it. A 1000+ pages book usually contain an excerpt of 1-2 paragraphs that allows the reader to understand the book. So, if you think a question is too broad. then so is the 1000 page book, yet author was able to introduce you to the answer in couple paragraphs.

Let someone with better understanding, experience and higher IQ do it!

Thanks

Answer 1

I reject your premise that every single broad question already has an answer, and I further reject the premise that every single broad question can be answered with a single google search.

There are plenty of broad questions that don't have an answer out there, simply because nobody has taken the time to answer that particular question.

There are many other broad questions that cannot possibly be answered. To give an example here, I'll take one of yours, "how can I become a professional php programmer?" That question is highly opinion based, in addition to being very broad. There is no way to provide a single, objectively correct, and complete, answer to that question. People can try, (and oh boy will they try) but their answers will invariably be incomplete, subjective, specific to their individual context, and there is no possible way that one can objectively evaluate the answers to determine if one is "correct" or not.

To your suggestion that we respond to all broad questions by either telling them what, to Google, providing nothing but a link, or a book suggestion: that is contrary to one of the core principles of why this site was created. The founders were annoyed at sites that contained nothing but links, or suggestions for topics to Google (which is super annoying to come across when you find the question by searching on that term) or in some other way telling you to go somewhere else. SO is a place to find answers. In order for it to be a place to actually find answers, it needs to restrict questions to those that can be answered within a scope reasonable for a post on this site. People can't effectively write a whole book here, so questions that would require it must be out of scope. If people choose to suggest books, provide, links, or suggest terms to Google in comments, they're free to do such. While that is certainly not required, it is also not prohibited either.

To your point that many broad questions are simply hard to find the relevant search terms for, I disagree. Yes, there are some questions asked that can be found through a simple search, if only the question author knew what to search on. Such questions have no real correlation to being "too broad". There are plenty of very specific questions that derive from someone not knowing the proper term to search on. In fact, I find that, in most cases, broad questions are less likely to be hard to find in search engines. To take one of your examples, "How can I become a professional php programmer?" has tons of results in Google that are entirely on topic.

Answer 2

So don't you agree that providing a service of answering GOOGLE-HARD

No. They aren't "GOOGLE-HARD" necessarily to be "too broad". Those questions typically have too many questions and/or questions which don't have a specific answer.

Ex.

"How do I create an Android app that does this and that. And also can you tell me how to send the data to a server."

That person needs to learn the basics first and ask a specific question. They probably also need to learn how to use Google more efficiently by using proper keywords.

Too address your examples of what you say is/isn't considered acceptable

broad questions like "how can i become a professional php programmer" is closed and banned

This is not a specific programming question so is not well-suited for SO. It is a broad question which isn't specifically about code.

while questions like " how to slice an array in php ? " are accepted,

This would be acceptable if it shows an attempt at "how to slice an array in php" because it is asking a specific programming question.