Why try to answer if you're unfamiliar with the question?

Question

I just don't get the responses like the comments I see on How to disable blue highlighting of text form field when selected in Word?

First two comments are "Can you provide a screenshot for before and after? I am not familiar" and "What do you mean by text form field ?"

Why try to answer a question that one knows nothing about? A huge number of Word users know what a text form field is; why not just pass it by?

Am I missing something here? I don't try to answer questions where it's clear that I don't understand the question itself, not because of the question wording but because it's out of my arena. Why would someone so unfamiliar with Word that they don't know what a "form field" is, push the poster to provide a screenshot or explain text form fields, rather than just go past it?

I want to say something about it on the comments, but I don't want to be confrontative or act like this newb is trying to tell others what to do.

To hopefully clarify a bit, to me this seems like if I posted a question about "How do I calculate a date x days before today in a Powershell script?" and show the code I'm trying to use etc., and the comments are "What's a Powershell script? Can you post a screenshot?" "What do you mean by 'calculate a date'?" etc.

If someone chooses, from all these questions, to answer about a certain program ... shouldn't they at least know the basics of that program, or at least have the ability to find those features on their own rather than putting the onus on the asker? In the original case cited, "form fields" have been a feature of word for over a decade, and are also used in other programs like Acrobat. If someone doesn't know what they are, though, why not just google or go by to the next question?

Answer 1

Your answer may be correct, because of your ability to clearly interpret the language used in the question as it applies to the program, but it's far from guaranteed that a local expert of the program under discussion will come along and be able to answer the question in one fell swoop.

In case you didn't notice, there are many questions on this site which are completely unanswered. Many other questions have an answer, but the OP looked at it and determined that it's incorrect. What you're suggesting is an "all-or-nothing" approach, where we should totally ignore questions that we can't answer right off the bat. This is a bad approach IMHO. Here are my reasons for arguing against this approach:

• Often, just by talking back and forth with the OP, the OP will think of the answer to their question by themselves. This happens surprisingly often! Even if you know nothing about the program or the problem domain, just listening to the user and giving your honest feedback and talking about the problem logically, often the OP will be able to post and accept their own answer, even if nobody else has any idea what they're talking about. Under your proposed behavior, these types of dialogue would never occur.

• Help Vampires (HVs) -- those who are trying to get the community to do their thinking for them -- often will show their true colors in the comments. If you read a question and it isn't immediately obvious whether the poster is a HV (i.e., someone we should not attempt to help), a comment or two should eliminate all ambiguity. Asking for clarification on the question is a great way to test for HV. On the other hand, if the poster is decidedly not a HV, any comment that carefully considers their question, shows some research effort, and makes logical sense, is bound to help the poster in some way. For non-HVs, getting the OP closer to an answer is better than keeping them in the dark. For HVs, their vampiric ways are exposed, and we can vote to close as "Unclear what you're asking".

• There are many questions where no one, except the OP, actually has enough information available to be able to definitively answer the question. Actually extracting the requisite information from the OP in order to be able to determine (or Google) a solution, is a challenge in its own right, and does end up helping the OP. When someone unfamiliar with a question's problem domain evaluates a potentially valid question, they don't know in advance whether someone like you will come along and answer it in one fell swoop and call everyone else out for being off the mark. All they can do is try to lead the OP in the right direction.

• Even if you don't end up providing a correct and on-point solution to the OP, it is still useful to help the OP exercise their brain. They (or someone else viewing the post at a much later time) can see your troubleshooting method, the way that you approached the problem, and the things you tried, and this might help them narrow down their issue. Or, perhaps one of the things you tried that didn't work for the OP, will turn out to work fine for someone else with a similar problem who finds the question on Google.

Point is, the traditional saying "silence is golden" is complete nonsense on StackExchange sites (especially SU, SO, SF). Silence is the worst thing you can do in response to a question, aside from deliberately misleading the OP away from the answer (that's called trolling). Any well-intentioned help is better than no help at all.

Answer 2

Its because we aren't just answering the OP's question - we're building a wider knowledge base. Even if the OP knows exactly what it is, this allows the next guy with a similar issue who may not know what its called to find the question and to benefit from it.

Well, there's a few factors here. There's no other way we can get clarification from most users (oh, chat users often do this, but we're a minority. Secondly, versions of words may be different, and folk may use different themes. Asking for screenshots (and using them in answers reduces ambiguity - as you noticed yourself, the instructions are different between versions. And sometimes the OP simply dosen't give enough information to tell what he's talking about.

There's also the case where you might be familiar with something similar, and the skills carry across to an extent.

Finally, in some cases you might think you know the answer, but want to be sure. It might be possible to dig up an answer from entirely research alone

Comments are meant for this, and once the question has been polished up, comment threads can be cleaned up.