Close reason: lacks basic research

Question

When going through the close queue, the most common reason I vote to close a question is because it lacks basic research. Either it's something easily answered by a web search, or the poster appears to lack the most basic knowledge of IT or security.

These questions are typically closed as "unclear what you're asking" or "too broad". However, neither of those are very satisfactory. Often the question is neither of those; the problem is it lacks basic research.

Possibly this could replace "unclear what you're asking" - or maybe we could keep both.

Answer 1

I've been feeling the same way, too. It's not about the "too basic" questions (hey, those are great for newer members to practice composing good Answers!), but for me, it's about answers being found:

1. in the top 5 Google hits using the Question title
2. within a link/source included in the Question itself

The answers are at their fingertips, but for some reason the asker decides to ask others instead of spending a minute looking at what they already have.

I don't think that a "close reason" is a good idea, though. First, there are very real cultural reasons why some people will ask others instead of looking at primary data. Second, it is also often the case that the asker did perform research, but they didn't include it in the question (either due to laziness or to wanting an answer unbiased by the research performed).

In either case, I believe that we need to prompt for research, not to close it for a canned reason. When I do this, there are 2 distinct camps: those who readily provide the research performed, or those who lash out that we didn't provide an easy answer. For the former, the problem is solved, for the latter, the available options or "Other" should suffice.

We do expect that askers have performed some basic research. We can encourage and mentor the community to do that.

Answer 2

This website is not meant to be reserved to IT Security professionals. Therefore, I think it would be difficult to close a post simply as being a "too basic IT security question".

What may be basic for one may not be for another: sometimes, people just need a keyword, the name of a concept, or something like that so they can engage their own researches. For instance, I remember someone trying to determine how to apply SSH-keys like security to SSL, all the OP needed was the term "client certificate" and he was happy with that.

The main "threats" that I see that such question could open would be the following ones:

• People needing a long explanation on a very basic topic, or people asking a lot of question on the same subjects or adding new questions while they get answers to the previous ones.

  All this seems perfect fit for the "Too Broad" requesting the OP to clearly narrow down its request,

• People mixing up unrelated terms and technologies into some nonsense gibberish, or having no clear idea about what they actually want or need (the famous "I want better security" without knowing against which threats).

  All this seems perfect fit for the "Unclear what you're asking".

• People having a too higher and non-technical view of an issue and asking a question through the scope of an anti-virus or other end-user software message, or asking how to achieve something using their GUI or web interface.

  Such request would fit in the off-topic "This question does not appear to be about Information security within the scope defined in the help center."

Answer 3

Mouse-over the down-vote button on a question, and you'll see this in the tooltip:

This question does not show any research effort; it is unclear or not useful.

(Emphasis mine.)

Questions with answers findable in the first 5 Google results need a down-vote, not closing. Sure, they might not be very useful for the professional community here. But they're still of interest to someone or else the answers wouldn't be so easily Googleable. By allowing them to remain here, and providing high-quality answers, we help this site to become one of those "first 5" sites.

Honestly, I'm not a big fan of the questions either, but they do serve a purpose.