How much should we enforce background research?

Question

The first point under "How do I ask a good question?" in Help states that:

Search, and research

Have you thoroughly searched for an answer before asking your question? Sharing your research helps everyone. Tell us what you found and why it didn’t meet your needs. This demonstrates that you’ve taken the time to try to help yourself, it saves us from reiterating obvious answers, and above all, it helps you get a more specific and relevant answer!

However, I find that quite many questions, especially the quora-style ones driven by general curiosity, often completely lack any attempt of background research from the poster. The questions are not necessarily bad - many are interesting (but broad) and well formed - but indicate that the poster haven't gone to any trouble themselves to get a basic overview of the subject. They often appear to be spur-of-the-moment questions based on "I wonder how this works...?". This also means that the questions are not in any way framed in relation to relevant theories and subfields of biology.

At e.g. StackOverflow, questions that lack a background (e.g. previous coding attempts) are generally downvoted and/or receives many comments pointing out that posters are expected to have done some work to try to solve their problem. This is often not the case here at BioSE.

So my question is; How much should we enforce background research? Since BioSE is still in beta and is building a community and gathering questions there is probably a delicate balance between bringing in/not scaring away users, while still upholding good SE standards. Also, trivial and unresearched questions can potentially drive away specialist users.

Answer 1

I agree that we probably do need to enforce this rule to some extent.

Part of the problem that I see is that a lot of asking the right question (that is, framing it in biological terms) requires knowing something of the field. There are times when you won't be able to find the answer on the internet if you don't know the right terminology. For non-biologists, this can be a problem. (I've had this issue in other subject areas in the past, and I've used Stack Exchange sites specifically for this reason.)

Also, sometimes easily answered questions are only that way because of access to publications - because I happen to be on the network of a university that subscribes to many of these publications, I can access them but I know that many others can't. I had a difficult time for the few months between the end of my undergraduate program and the start of my graduate program, when I realized just how many publications I couldn't read.

In short, I do not think we need to go around closing questions for only this reason: I think it's better for us to help the asker learn the right terminology. I think we can start by improving questions - there are lots of other reasons to close.

I should add that I would enforce this rule in cases where the right terminology is used and you do know the answer is easily found elsewhere. I do try to filter my own questions - I had a question about double label in situs that I was about to ask before I found a webpage elsewhere. (I don't always succeed, but I try.)

Answer 2

I would like to bump this question, as well as try to answer.

If we throw away all junk questions and surely homework-style ones, there are bunch of questions that don't offer any evidence of an effort from OP. And that is what for my view is not a good practice, not a good behavior to encourage.

As @dd3 says, sometimes you lack terminology or language to google properly. Hinting to it might be beginning of a good answer or at least a comment.

Comment that some research requires access to subscription-based literature is soft to my taste as I find only minute details in most current research. Overviews are often available for free.

To reiterate, SE model encourages users to ask for help along the way, not a free ride to solution. And to my opinion this is the culture that should be fostered everywhere.