I am new to Biology and am very interested to know how things work around here.
The question here seems perfectly valid to me. Yet it has been put on hold as homework question.
I checked the OP. I saw that he was a new user with account only in biology.
- If an OP who has, say a 1000 rep at SO, posts the same question, will it be put on hold as a homework question?
- If so, can you cite any example?
- Does the reputation of OP have any role in deciding whether the question is put on hold as homework type?
The problem I can see here is the varied scenario:
- The OP knows very little about biology, as (s)he is a, say programmer. So to understand a curious phenomena instead of sifting through whole wikipedia pages, struggling to understand a whole lot of terminologies, their application etc... (s)he posts a question in Biology, which gets closed as homework
- The OP really is a student who is posting his/her homework question
- The OP is a new person trying to gain some reputation AND getting his/her question answered (some OPs in this case might know answers to question posted)
- OP has already tried to search for answers but can get nowhere, maybe precisely because (s)he does not know how to search for it (Lack of research was cited as the reason for 'Homework Question'). Answers to some questions can be easily found if the right terminology is used in searching. However in case, the OP does not know that (term) and posts the question here, biologists who know such terminology can consider the question as silly and put it on hold.
- The time given for the research is very short and the OP has to complete his/her task within alloted time - It would be very bad if the question would be closed without atleast a good reference so the OP can do research.
- The subject is too broad to find the specifics, which would be a very good reason to post a question here, even if such specifics could easily be found by reading through whole article
Edit 1: The question cited above is just an example to show that questions which seem valid to some would seem as homework question to others. I am not asking for an explanation as to why this question was closed.
Based on the answer by Dustin, I see that my question should also include the level of expertise expected from an OP.