guys, I see far too few suggested edit for the quality of some posts. One guy even had a picture for math! Am I being too pedantic, do you not care or do you not have the time?
right, I'm saying marking them is redundant. The type of question is obvious whether it be for homework or not. If you ask if L={0^n 1^2} is a regular language, I don't want to say yes by my explaination.
Lets get on the same page about what questions I'm referring to first
I'm saying there is a set of questions Q = {q in Q | q is a question about the foundations of computer science. The question is either abstract or is clearly not a real world situation and is intended to further the askers knowledge of the subject of the question}
Those can be either current students, students reviewing their past course work, or professionals learning new material
Well give that set of questions, my opinion is that we should always answer in a way that gives them to tools to answer but not the exact solution. Atleast leave them just short of it
maybe a tag that doesn't say Homework, the big reason I'm against the homework tag is some users see it as students being lazy, instead the answers just need to be hints, but getting the community there seems not possible as stackoverflow seems to have shown
and so SE is a repository of knowledge that could not be indexed like an encyclopedia and requires humans to generate upon request rather than preemptively
@brandon I kind of agree that homework is a bad name, but it's an established name
I'd be for homework if it wasn't for those people who aggressively want to retag things as homework
if we always took the asker's word for it, with a tag meaning “I just want a hint”, I'd be less opposed
However, coming back to what I just wrote: just-a-hint answers aren't as reusable as complete answers
just-a-hint answers aren't very valuable to future visitors
That makes them not such a great fit to SE
If you want a hint, you can ask for it in a non-lasting place, like chat
I've had questions closed on stackoverflow because I didnt' tag it as homework. The problem was that it wasn't homework, I was reviewing past tests from a prior semester.
As far as just-a-hint, a huge portion of questions for this site will be of that type, that'd be a whole other subject though
Maybe I'll start a meta thread on just-a-hint if thats cool with you gilles, I'de like to see what people think of that. Probably won't work, but may as well try
I have been actively removing (this is not a homework question) from questions just because I think "assuming the question is not homework" should always be the default
@Raphael the thing is, some sites like Math have a homework policy that if not forbids, at least strongly discourages questions that stem from homework and aren't tagged homework
@Raphael, I think a big issue there is that students generally want the full answer but the community knows better than to give it. So the spoiler would just be abused and wouldn't satisfy the community in that the student would just look anyway
@Raphael if we have a homework tag, someone is bound to want a policy for applying it, and we'll end up like Math before we know it
I am strongly against a homework policy. I don't want to discriminate questions on the basis of the asker, including whether the asker is enrolled in a course or not.
> If you're gonna make a policy on this, it should be something that rewards answers that step the asker through the problem, leaving him to determine the final answer perhaps but providing enough information to get him (or anyone else with a similar problem) there.
@Raphael the subtext is that Mark was a mod on Programmers and was accused of “not being a real programmer” because he closed some questions that others considered fundamental (like favorite programmer cartoon or whatever triggered that particular outburst)
@Raphael this is an example. It has two answers that explain how to get started, and don't answer the question in the title
But there was no need for a homework tag: the actual question is “What do the words in the language look like? How could I represent it using a grammar or regular expression?”
And by the way (Cc @brandon) I think the title question would make a good SE question too. It's a different question, both would benefit the site.
@Raphael Besides the larger opportunity for people to contribute, non-trivial discussions about the site scope need to be recorded on meta, so we can deduce general rules for future questions
Above a certain amount of debate in comments/chat, there must be a meta question
The question Good uses of computer viruses was closed as off-topic, and is being reopened as I write.
Is this question on-topic on the Computer Science site? Why or why not?
This relates to the following discussion:
Homework tag discussion
After talking to Gilles in chat about possible solutions to the homework tag problem. The tag just-a-hint was suggested. The purpose of just-a-hint would be to include all questions that are students asking homework questions or j...
I migrated a question from cstheory. I flagged some comments as obsolete as they referred to shutting the question on cstheory. It'd be good if someone removed them to avoid any unnecessary additional comments here.
