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Is it appropriate to ask questions on Stack Overflow without prior research?

I've asked a questions on stackoverflow that are closed almost immediately and instead referred to either a Wikipedia article or told to search Google, neither of which answered my question.

Are the higher-ups at stack overflow trying to reduce traffic?

It seems to me like even if the answer could be found on Wikipedia, it would still make sense to keep it open here, since they are separate sites. I rather post something here, which gets seen by more programmers in-the-know, than on Wikipedia, which seems to have been becoming more of a joke.

Regardless, I'd like to get my answer from one place. So which do you recommend as the best source for programming/hardware-related questions? Google, Wikipedia, or here?

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I looked at your previous questions, and one was closed because there was a previous question covering it, and the other was migrated to superuser, where you got several answers.

The "higher-ups" at stackoverflow are just users who have been around long enough to have enough rep points to do some actions, like voting to close/migrate questions. They are not trying to reduce traffic, but actually the opposite. By closing duplicate questions and moving off-topic questions the signal to noise ratio is kept up, making it easier to find actual information on the site.

If you want answers to both programming and hardware questions, you can't use only stackoverflow, as that is intended for programming related questions. Google itself doesn't contain any information, so of your three choises, only Wikipedia is left.

As Wikipedia covers pretty much everything, you will not find any in-depth answers to very specific questions. For programming related questions you will find definitions for various concepts, but no answers to specific programming problems, like the ones stackoverflow is full of.

So, don't try to find a single source for all answers, you will not get good answers that way.

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Are the higher-ups at stack overflow trying to reduce traffic?

Were your questions closed by higher-ups, or were they closed - as almost every closed question on SO is - by five normal users who felt your questions were off-topic?

So which do you recommend as the best source for programming/hardware-related questions? Google, Wikipedia, or here?

For your two questions on SO - essentially "what is a quantum computer" and "what is HTML5" - I'd go to Google or Wikipedia, because the answers are available there, instantly and with references. Those questions have been answered here already, and having people repeat those straight-forward answers ad nauseum wastes everyone's time.

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I've asked a questions on stackoverflow that are closed almost immediately and instead referred to either a Wikipedia article or told to search Google, neither of which answered my question.

That means you did not search enough, or with the correct terms.

Google first, and if you can't find anything, ask here, as with pretty much any other forum / discussion / question server.

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