Is really simple not simple enough?

Question

After listening to the discussion on the podcast this week, I thought I had a pretty good idea of what sort of questions could be considered too simple for SO. For example, I would have thought that the question

What is a Subclass

would be the perfect contender. However, with a bunch of answers (many of them from high-rep users) and an upvote, it certainly seems like it's more than welcome in our community. Personally, I don't see how the question (and the answers for that matter), is adding any new knowledge (or value) to the Internet. I've flagged it for moderator attention, but I'm still not sure that was the right thing to do. With all those answers, maybe I should have kept my flags to myself..?

Have I misunderstood the whole "too simple"-guideline, or is it that these questions are actually welcome because they generate a lot of easy rep for the answerers?

Edit:

I've asked this question on English. Let's see how it fares over there, shall we?

https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/23598/what-is-a-sentence

Update:

The good people over at English closed my question within 10 minutes. Meanwhile, around 30 minutes later, Jeff closed the original SO version of it. I'm a happy camper.

Answer 1

I don't think the question is bad. I could envision high quality answers being provided to it that would be useful to the community. As simple as it is, references like this are desperately needed by beginning programmers. Too often, they either don't know the basics or have some severe misconceptions thereof.

But if you ask me, the problem is that the answers are terrible. No, they're not inaccurate. But they're also not of very high quality, nor are they very complete.

A subclass is a class that extends another class.

That doesn't tell me anything more than a dictionary would. And not a very good dictionary, either, as it uses the word in the definition. All you've done is defined the prefix "sub". It's a "straightforward" explanation indeed (as noted in a comment), but it's also pretty minimalistic.

Indeed, I think that's the primary problem with questions like this one. Users see the question and think "Woohoo! Finally one I know the answer to!" Then they fire off a quick answer, hoping to gain a bunch of reputation points. It does, in a strictly literal sense, answer the question, so others are reluctant to vote it down. But it's pathetically incomplete, and the question fails in what I think is its more important purpose as a canonical reference. There are plenty of times that I'd like to point users to a question like this as an inline link in one of my answers, but I'd never point them to this one.

I don't know how we fix this, though. We can't discourage questions that are "too simple", as that's an arbitrary threshold and it goes against our mission as becoming the best resource for programming problems, no matter what size or level. And we can't really discourage people from posting answers, as those are the foundation of this site. I've long been an advocate of the policy that "no question is too simple", but recently, I've began to doubt my long-held opinion. Simple questions tend to attract such simple, useless answers that perhaps they aren't adding anything to the community at all...

Answer 2

First off, answers from high-rep users and upvotes don't necessarily indicate a valid question. The impulse to answer often overrides the idea of pausing to think whether something is a good question in the first place.

Anyway, the question you show is a bit of an edge case - it might create really good answers on the site.

There is a different category of "manual reference" questions where the definition is much clearer. Here are some example taken from my related feature request:

• PHP - make all caps? (answer: strtoupper())
• Adding a background image to a <div> element (answer: background-image)
• Is it possible to get UNIX time from such date 2011-02-27 02:04:46? (answer: strtotime())

Answer 3

I'm not going to go so far as to say that that looks to me like a model question, but I don't see anything really wrong with it. It's true that it's a basic topic, but it's reasonably well-formed, isn't "show me the code", and generated a diverse bunch of potentially-useful-to-future-readers responses.

I think I've heard a rule of thumb that if you think its "Not a Real Question" and someone answers it, then it was a real question after all (as long as it's a real answer, of course!). (This frustrates me sometimes, but I try to remind myself that walking away from the computer is always an option. :) )

I'm especially impressed by the questioner's involvement with the answerers -- asking for details from almost all of them, and in some cases prompting a revision to a better answer. The OP also seems to have gotten the requested information, may have upvoted a few responses, and selected an answer as accepted. Would that more questioners acted this way.

On balance, I'd say this question is a "success", but I do empathize (and frequently sympathize) with your frustration over simple questions.

That is, as they say, "just one man's opinion" however. Also, I haven't heard the podcast.