Reasons for closing questions: too little effort

Question

This is, in a certain way, a reiteration of Henri Menke's question/request "Please add more off-topic close reasons". At the moment of writing this, this question has one highly voted answer, which did, however, not get accepted.

The reason for this post is simple: rather frequently questions are closed because it is "unclear what you are asking" or "too broad". A non-negligible subset of these questions appears to be closed for other reasons: too little effort by the OP. Such questions are also referred to as "do-this-for-me".

My question here is: does the fact that "too little effort" (or something equivalent) is not among the options one can choose mean that

• we are not supposed to close these questions, or
• we do not want to confront the OP with the statement "you show too little effort" and thus choose another reason to close it?

If the second option describes the situation, wouldn't it be better to add a new option that politely says that we expect more effort?

Of course, it is tricky because a good question does not necessarily involve a lot of effort. In fact, some of the highest voted questions are very basic and do not involve any MWE. So, in this sense, "too little effort" may not be a valid reason for closure on its own. On the other hand, "unclear what you are asking" does not seem to be right either.

P.S. If we add new options for closure, we may also consider adding "Solved in the comments" because this happens quite frequently, and usually the official reason is "Off-topic: solved in the comments" but I can't see why a question that has been solved in the comments "off-topic". Of course, I do not disagree with closing it because it is really no longer an open question.

Answer 1

One possible custom reason could be

Not generally applicable

which is close to the old 'Too localized' reason we used to use.

Many of the questions that closed after a comment trail or are 'do it for me' are probably only of real use to the person asking the question, but not more widely. That's for example the case if the question comes down to a typo/misunderstanding, or for 'draw it for me'. They are very hard to search for, and likely the answer won't directly help anyone else.

Answer 2

It's possibly true that do-it-for-me questions have wider applicability, but they would only be found by chance. It is unlikely that people will find posts in any meaningful way when you have a title like "How do I draw this picture?" or similar. So with the site geared towards a community of knowledge, it's often that these questions are closed.

Historically we used to identify such questions as being "too localized." That made sense. Now the broader reason is considered off-topic, which doesn't always sit well. However, I've grown to understand that it's only a means to an end for content that doesn't fit the other titles. This is a network-wide specification and would likely not be changed unless there is network-wide support for alternative/improved closure capability.

If the wording is something that you (or anyone) sticks to, then you should consider voting accordingly as well. Do-it-for-me questions typically "show little/no research effort", exactly what the downvote button is labelled as:

It's too often that people are scared to vote, because it may be seen as negative in terms of our supportive community (and cause loss of reputation when downvoting on answers). In voting accordingly, however, you are supporting the community to separate good from excellent, and bad from horrible.

Answer 3

I changed my mind, let them open!

My useless war against just-do-it-for-me questions is over, since it causes more harm than good.

From now on, I'll join David's philosophy: I'll ask for an MWE only if it is stricly necessary to answer.

I'll close a question only for the already specified reasons, but I'll continue to downvote the just-do-it-for-me questions asked by old users.

Answer 4

We always had just-do-it-for-me-questions and we will always have them. They are often answered and they will be answered in the future.

After all, an answer does help the person who asked the question and it gets the person who answers some free reputation from upvotes. You cannot get coffee from Stackexchange reputation ... but still, nice to have.

Answer 5

After a nice discussion with @marmot some time ago. After a long thought, my opinion is as follows:

In a diplomatic and democratic way, I, for instance, decided to

1. downvote and cast a vote to close (giving explanation on "Why-I-Chose-To-Close") bad questions posted by members who have been here for a long-time now (irrespective of their reputation, but not applicable to new users).

2. Nevertheless, answer it, if I really have some spare time. But mention explicitly that they need to provide an MWE (iff necessary). On the other hand, if I don't have time, I would choose not to answer it.

3. However, irrespective of the rep/the user's time in our site, if the question is challenging/interesting, I would answer it anyway.

4. If the OP gives a starting point, I will convert my downvote to an upvote and retract my vote to close the question. And, if the question is already closed, I suppose editing makes the question pop-up in the review queue. Hence, I will vote to re-open it anyways.

Please read the aforementioned points in an ascending linear sequence.

Answer 6

Actually this is a Question of how do we define effort (or proof there-of) here. i personally had already the Problem of having to typeset a very common Symbol that how ever not is among any of the common Symbols packages. and a quick Google for the Symbols Name + "latex" did not Show up anything. so in this case a do it for me Kind a Question was Born. and someone gave me as an answer "just use tikz for it" but in all honesty i would not expect someone to read like dozens of pages of documentation on some Latex package that s/he probably never used before and Maybe will never again after the Job is done. (i for example didnt even know that tikz is a Thing and i still dont know the least About using it...).

therefor someone must first define how effort is to be proven. (or did someone already and i just never noticed?)