Etiquette for poorly researched questions?

Question

I would like to open a discussion on this matter, because to the best of my knowledge, there has not been an answer covering, poorly researched questions in Tex SE.

For clarity purposes I am not talking about: Our Do-it-for-me and Draw-it-for-me comments don't reflect our hypocrisy. Can they be improved? or “Draw this for me” etiquette.

What I am referring to, are questions that are not low quality, do not have long, complicated solutions and could be resolved by a careful Google search. There are not low quality since they are valid questions but at the same time these questions could be resolved by looking instead of asking.

Made up examples:

• "How can I make my figure/table/equation/... do this".

• "How do you do this", which "this", is something specific that can be resolved by including the appropriate package.

These are valid questions and more people might have them but since, a solution has already been provided (on the internet not in Tex SE) and it is easy to find and implement, shouldn't they be distinguished from the rest of the questions? Like the Documentation section in SO.

Should these questions be treated as "Do-it-for-me" questions, should they be flagged as low-quality or is there an alternative way of handling them?

Answer 1

Every so often this sort of question comes up, and although it gets posed usually as 'etiquette' it's often more about 'policing' or 'teaching people a lesson'. Personally I think such 'policing' behaviour is never productive for the site.

As others have noted in the comments, most things can be figured out by reading the documentation or Googling. But documentation isn't always the easiest thing to read (even though some is very good) and users may not be native English speakers, in which case reading documentation may be more difficult than you might think.

When I see a fairly simple question, I often google for things that would appear in an answer. This allows me to find duplicates on the site quite easily. But I'm googling because I know what the answer should be. But the person asking the question presumably doesn't know that, so their googling task is in fact much harder.

With respect to RTFM type answers, I think it's always helpful to point out that the answer can be found in the documentation, but only if you are willing to provide an answer independently.

But if you don't want to do that, then don't. All of us have different motivations for answering and participating on the site. If you don't think a particular kind of question should be answered, then simply ignore it, and answer the questions that you find interesting and worth answering.

If others want to answer these questions, they will, and that should be fine.