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Comments on Is sharing prior research does more harm than good, in general, in Q&A sites?

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Is sharing prior research does more harm than good, in general, in Q&A sites?

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Some Q&A websites such as StackExchange require from people asking questions to share "minimal prior research" that they had done to try to answer their question themselves (and often also juxtapose a request for "evidence" for such prior research).

I can understand why "prior research" is required for say, Code review StackExchange, where I myself shared several codes I have developed after I first tested them myself and understood that they allegedly work as expected but I still wanted a review to make others and myself learn if perhaps I could write the code more efficiently.

  • Prior research enables community learning
  • Prior research is good for SEO as it raises the quality of a webpage; simply put, the webpage becomes more "on topic" not only by a (desirably) good heading but also by a richer inner content.

But if:

X = My Problem
Y = How I tried to solve it but failed
Z = My question (why how I tried to solve it failed?)

One could easily be accused with the (philosophical idea) commonly known as "XY problem".

And yet, if we only describe a problem, perhaps the only practical question to ask without causing an "XY problem" would be "How would you solve that problem?" and if so, perhaps a better concept than "Q&A" websites would be "Problem describing and solution suggestion websites".

Is sharing prior research does more harm than good, in general, in Q&A sites?

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Monica Cellio‭ wrote almost 4 years ago

This is a question about the site, not about writing, so we've moved it to Meta.