I wanted to collect together a couple of random things about asking questions on the ‘net. I don’t have comments, just want to get them out of my Firefox tabs and think about them again later. :-)
- Spartanicus, in comp.infosystems.www.authoring.stylesheets:
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“Welcome to usenet, post a url here and you may find that we will discuss
the problems with it. If that includes what you were asking about,
consider yourself lucky.We don’t raise these issues to put you down, but to draw your attention
to real problems.” - Mark Pilgrim,
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Why we won’t help you if you haven’t validated your HTML.
- Eric Raymond,
- Adina Levin,
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The Raymond Rule, coining a term for making sure to exhaust all resources on your own before asking for help; we’ve had some interesting discussions on the sociology of this, related to geek/non-geek and gender.
On words-l, we’ve got an opposite tradition, encapsulated by the acronym “IMFTATL” (It’s More Fun To Ask The List). Asking questions, even obvious ones, and getting interesting answers and comments is a good social bonding there.