While growing up in 70’s, I’ve always been taught “there is no such thing as a ‘stupid’ question. only stupid answers”. But, quickly you learn this adage seems to only apply in grade school as a student. In the real world and on the Internet, I learned there are questions that could make you look quite ‘stupid’ if you asked them. More than likely, you will also be ridiculed for asking them. ‘Dumb’ questions include those that are extremely obvious. One example that comes to mind is when one of my employees ask me “Will I get in trouble if come in really late tomorrow? I have a dinner party to go to with my family.”. Our company has strict policies on attendance and has clear procedures on what happens when an employee is late for work. The employee also knows this, but he/she will still ask the question anyway.
On the Internet, there are many different discussion forums on a wide variety of topics. These forums also have communities, people who frequently visit the forum and answer questions that are posted. I personally have not yet been a part of discussion forum or in any of these communities. That doesn’t mean I have never visited one. I visit them from time to time when I need to find information or for my own personal entertainment, and most of the time I usually find the information I am looking for.
Stack Overflow is question and answer website for computer programming. Being fairly new to programming, I am not familiar with this website. One of the things I noticed that is different from others I have visited is there is a view counter for the questions. There is also a vote counter where people could ‘like’ or ‘dislike’ the question. One of the not so smart questions I found is “How can one send an email to 100,000 users on a weekly basis in PHP?” http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3905734/how-to-send-100-000-emails-weekly This type of question is poor and not appropriate for the site. Probably, because it appeared the user was trying to learn how to spam. This question was viewed 123k times and had a -147 star rating. There were many questions on Stack Overflow that had 1000+ and 500k+ views. These ‘smart’ questions were written clearly and were precise about the problem. They also had meaningful subject headers. Unfortunately, since I am still fairly new to programming, and I could not pick out one particular question because I am not yet familiar with the programming languages. Hopefully as I gain more experience, I can take advantage of websites like Stack Overflow to broaden my knowledge of computer programming.
One thing I’ve also learned is the way you phrase a question matters. If you phrase it in smart way, you may get more people to reply and actually get the answers you are looking for.