Never the quality - Feel the width ? 4

[guestgulkan]

Personnaly I am appalled at the seemingly low levels of questions being posted to the forums.
Many of the questions come from so called 'Technical Users' and 'Programmers'.
Some of these questions from 'programmers' I can answer of the top of my head and I'm a 'technical user'.
Some of the technical questions are so trivial, I just cannot be bothered with them.
Are my standards too high??

 

[edfair]

BJ,
The red flag is for the clueless. Don't be afraid, Dave will sort it out.

I see lots of answers where I am clueless. So I learn some more.

I see lots of answers where the person giving the answer is clueless. Those I try to gently inform.

And I see an occasional poster that is giving spurious answers to do damage. Those I RF. Ed Fair
Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply. Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.

 

[BJCooperIT]

OK, Here is a question for all of you:
Have you ever seen a request that sounds like the person knows what they are talking about, but makes you wonder if there is a gaping hole in YOUR knowledge base?

I will step to the plate here. There is a question on one of the Oracle forums that talks about "tablespace fillments". I have never even heard of that. I searched the web and came up with zero hits. Makes me believe that the question is bogus OR mispelled (perhaps a language translation to English issue?) ***OR*** there is some feature of Oracle that I have managed to be absent for my whole career. Very disconcerting.

In any event the more I know the more I realize that I don't know. I am running as fast as I can and the treadmill is winning!
(select * from life where brain is not null)
Consultant/Custom Forms & PL/SQL - Oracle 8.1.7 - Windows 2000

 

[manarth]

"Have you ever seen a request that sounds like the person knows what they are talking about, but makes you wonder if there is a gaping hole in YOUR knowledge base?"

That'd be the BS factor
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[drdebit]

well maybe bs-maybe not. I have no idea what you're talking about in regard to oracle (that's the lady at Delphi) but in general:
One of the things I've had to realize is that these forums command an audience from all around the world, with differing commands of the english language. Add that to the differing levels of expertise being discussed above, I think it is quite possible to have legitimate but confusing questions due to vocabulary/descriptive issues.

 

[Tarwn]

Questions like &quot;what's wrong with global variables?&quot; or &quot;why did my doubly-linked list blast me into segment-error-space?&quot; may not be things &quot;serious&quot; professionals ever ask, but they make for interesting discussions

I agree totally, I love questions that spark off discussion into the nature of the language or technology in the forums. My girlfriend, on the other hand, doesn't like them as much because these are the ones that keep me interested and have me sitting in front of the computer for hours on end trying to write custom benchmarking programs and useless HSBtoRGB color chooser objects in ASP (4mil colors and my computer started to whine ).

I don't believe the forums are at all over-professional. I disagree that someone at a certain point becomes to knowledgeable to ascertain when a question is to easy. The area around intermediate is rather grey for me, but I believe I am still capable of seeing when a question is to easy for the forums.

The problem I have is that even after these posts have been directed to material with the answer, other users will come along and answer them, in the end encouraging people to not bother searching or learning for themselves. I find this highly annoying.

cian: I agree that it is better for people to not answer questions to easy for them, as it gives people with less experience the opportunity to explore and learn more, but disagree with the fact that experts will necessarally give only an answer instead of exploring the process. There are people, unfortunatly, that gain &quot;expert&quot; status in the forums by simply posting to every post they come across, no matter how easy or how hard, and also tend to give answers rather than lead through the process or give direction. I dislike these people quite a bit, I'm pretty sure I am not one of them, but it worries me to see people like this get rated as experts.
The difference between someone who can bring you a lot of right answers and someone who is an expert is the fact that one of them knows it works, and the other knows why and how it works.

And I lost my point in there somewhere so I will wander back to my post-work padded room now

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[drdebit]

specific answers are good.

 

[guestgulkan]

Ah, I thought the topic might bring out some controversy. Or should I say enlightened opinions?
I will try and curb my judgemental tendencies .
Stars all round.

 

[lionelhill]

... and as a postscript from me, it's a Jolly Good Job that people in Tech Tips are friendly and tolerant of the occasional slip in standards: I've just been treated gently elsewhere for an answer of mine that was incredibly dumb, missing the point altogether. Probably we all fail to read the question from time to time, so it's nice to be forgiven.

 

[CajunCenturion]

I do not agree with the &quot;over-professionalism&quot; judgement, for two reasons. In the VB forum, we do have occasionally some very interesting discussion questions. &quot;To Bind or Not to Bind&quot; has been one, and we've also had a discussion on the use of Variants. Secondly, what makes such a discussion not professional? What becomes un-professional is when the participants start argueing, and/or become personal, and not sticking with discussing the issues.

If you want to have such a discussion, then I suggest that you start a thread, and ask the question.

There have been questions and answers that I don't have a clue about, and some that I only thought I didn't have a clue about. As already stated by others, there are varying degrees of English command being used, and sometimes, the same concept had a different name. In this regard, we all need to practice a certain amount of tolerance with respect to language. Good Luck
--------------
As a circle of light increases so does the circumference of darkness around it. - Albert Einstein

 

[rexxxy]

I thought I knew everything about Windows 98, then today I discovered something, pretty trivial, but pretty simple. No one knows everything. We are here to learn from eachother. I think tek-tips is a great community.

 

[planetstickboy]

I only stumbled across tek-tips a couple of hours ago but already it's the most professional forum I've seen - I'd love everyone at work to use these standards. You need people with a wide range of abilities who are *all* taken seriously and aren't scared to ask questions (and are *sometimes* given a straight answer ;-)).

It's like when someone new joins your office then you answer their *too easy* questions, because you know full well they'll be doing the same to the new kid in 10 years' time. And you can often learn by their &quot;That's dumb, but actually, what if...&quot; questions.

Saying that I'm signed up to more forums on tek-tips than I've seen threads, so maybe I'm missing something .

Lionelhill - I just realised I've spend 3 paragraphs agreeing with you. Have a star.