Timeline for Should we encourage SQL questions that just dump a schema without any attempt first?
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| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Apr 24, 2019 at 20:14 | vote | accept | Dale K | ||
| Apr 24, 2019 at 12:57 | comment | added | Machavity Mod | @DaleBurrell I'm trying to describe the problem in general. We talk about this overall problem on a semi-frequent basis. | |
| Apr 24, 2019 at 12:56 | answer | added | MachavityMod | timeline score: 39 | |
| Apr 24, 2019 at 12:52 | comment | added | Gimby | "how questions are treated seems to me to depend on who is online around the time of posting" - yes and no, there are definitely sub-communities tied to tags that share a similar outlook on things. It also works the other way around, tags such as C and C++ tend to see far stricter adherence to quality standards than what we're used to that also sometimes has an almost weekly meta post about it. | |
| Apr 24, 2019 at 12:51 | comment | added | Dale K | @Machavity - not sure that "dump a schema" is accurate... the cases I am talking about just have sample data + expected data, not even a schema. | |
| Apr 24, 2019 at 12:35 | comment | added | Dale K | @Gimby your first comment should probably be an answer. What would be even better is if the general populace could have somewhere to discuss this unspoken leniency which would then be a spoken leniency. Because how questions are treated seems to me to depend on who is online around the time of posting. | |
| Apr 24, 2019 at 12:27 | history | edited | MachavityMod | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
Clarified title
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| Apr 24, 2019 at 12:22 | comment | added | Dale K | @Gimby I suppose the other thing is, how much are these people really learning? My guess is that some people are being paid to do a job they don't know how to do, and are getting by because they can post their problems on SO. But whether they can then support/modify/tweak their code... | |
| Apr 24, 2019 at 12:19 | comment | added | Dale K | @HansPassant and even if the titles where meaningful, and google could index them in a useful way, the person trying to solve these problems probably won't know what to search for, and probably won't be able to translate the answer from a different data set to their own, even if the technique is the same. Oh well :) | |
| Apr 24, 2019 at 12:19 | comment | added | Gimby | I wouldn't be apposed to a site dedicated to answering questions about HTML, CSS, regex and SQL to be honest. Questions in the format "I need this result, but I don't know exactly how to phrase it". A: "Like this!", A: "Or like this!". That site can have specifically more lenient rules about question and answer quality and duplication. That is probably what grinds the gears of most people regarding these topics; they're really hard to dupe-close. | |
| Apr 24, 2019 at 12:14 | comment | added | Hans Passant | "won't be of any use" is the core problem, I think. Google just does a poor job of indexing these kind of questions, so nobody is expected to have done any research. The [regex] tag has this problem as well. In both cases a steady supply of SO users that don't mind posting a quicky answer keeps the tags alive. Notable is that their answer rate is much better than other mainstream tags. | |
| Apr 24, 2019 at 12:02 | comment | added | Dale K | @Grimby yeah I can get the unspoken leniency that basically answers the second part of my question. And I guess the fuzzy line of whether to downvote or not comes down to whether the OP has just dumped data expecting an answer or whether they have taken the time to clearly explain what they are looking for, even if they don't know where to start. Or something :) | |
| Apr 24, 2019 at 11:23 | comment | added | Gimby | From what I've seen, many SQL questions take this form. And to add insult to injury, answers tend to be code-only. It's just the way it is, there are specific tags that kind of have an unspoken leniency when it comes to the site rules; SQL questions should be on-topic, but you often can't really write a question that is 100% according to the site rules just for the very nature of the subject matter. Of course if you bring it to meta then it will be condemned because rules is rules, but the general populace that answers SQL questions thinks differently. The same for HTML and CSS. | |
| Apr 24, 2019 at 8:46 | comment | added | AakashM | Related: the faq-proposed Why should I provide an MCVE for what seems to me to be a very simple SQL query? | |
| Apr 24, 2019 at 6:37 | history | edited | jonrsharpe | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
deleted 6 characters in body
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| Apr 24, 2019 at 6:30 | comment | added | honk | This phenomenon is not specific to SQL Server. There are also numerous "How to convert this dataframe into this dataframe" questions of the same taste... | |
| Apr 24, 2019 at 5:45 | history | edited | Dale K |
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| Apr 24, 2019 at 5:31 | comment | added | Dale K | Maybe we need a "Write my query" addition to the SE family? :) | |
| Apr 24, 2019 at 5:24 | history | asked | Dale K | CC BY-SA 4.0 |