How to treat young users?

Question

We've recently acquired a new user who is clearly quite young.

This user is asking quite a few low quality questions and is attracting a lot of down votes and votes to close.

I am torn as to how to approach this.

On the one hand, I understand that part of growing and learning in complex fields, is learning how to ask good questions, how to conduct your own research etc. I think I understand the motivation of this young person and it is likely that this is their first experience of Stack Exchange and how it's different to any place else. At 14/15/16, I wouldn't have had a clue how to behave around here.

On the other hand, I hang out here because of the quality and factual, pithy, Q&A. I do of course understand that SE will clear out the closed questions but, there remain questions about how this user perceives the community because of the rapid down votes, how the community increasingly responds ("oh no, not another poor question") and so on.

It's a dichotomy to me, and I don't have any smart answers. The only thought that springs to mind is let the community do what it does and the stack to cleanse itself but this seems trite.

My motivation is in trying to establish if making allowances for age should be part of our DNA.

Should we (I) just let the system do it's thing?

Answer 1

With the exception of the network-wide policy on age which is a result of US law I'm generally not in favor of "making allowances" – questions and answers are either "good" (meeting our standards) or "not good" (failing to meet our standards). They should be upvoted, downvoted, closed, or deleted accordingly.
Vote your conscience in this regard - you will not wind up electing an octopus to the presidency.

We can fix some problems through editing or inviting the user into chat for extended discussions (which are often a more effective way of exploring their curiosity than a bunch of hastily-written questions on the main site).

Users with chronically poor questions/answers may get a polite note from a moderator pointing them to the site's help pages (which we can discuss expanding) and examples of good questions as guidance, but ultimately there is a certain expectation of effort and quality on the site, and if someone isn't meeting that I'm not going to be horribly upset if they storm off in a huff because they perceive those expectations as "mean" or "rude".

This approach serves the greatest number of users: It helps those asking questions (if they're willing to do a little work themselves to make sure they ask good questions), and it ensures that the content on the main site is of a high enough quality to attract more advanced users and experts to answer the more detailed questions we get.

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In this particular case the user in question has asked a good number of questions (26 to date), and the 8 most recent ones have been poorly received (negative vote totals), and at least one is face-palmingly first-Google-result lazy (IMHO we should not be used as a substitute for Google: An answer should be more than "It's this. They say so here." - It should include explanation and additional relevant information).

This may or may not represent a troubling trend: If the user continues to ask poorly-received questions it will likely trip the automatic "Multiple closed questions" flag at which point moderators may step in and explain why the questions are being closed and encourage more legwork before asking.

Answer 2

We had another young user a while back who was doing something fairly similar (his user name escapes me for some reason.) I actually invited him to a chat and we went over, at great length, things that he could do to improve the quality of his questions. We had several of these sessions (if memory serves). It took a little bit of work, but after some time, the quality of questions started to rise.

In all honesty, I think it's the only thing that really can be done.

Why? Well....I do believe we should always be welcoming to newcomers and we should always give the benefit of the doubt to anyone who asks an "obvious" question (I said so on Anonymous's latest question). But, I also realize that, this being Stack Exchange, people are kind of trained to downvote poor questions without really putting a lot of thought into it. I don't agree with it, but it's a hard behavior to train out of the community. Sometimes you just have to accept a situation for what it is, you know?

So, in my experience, trying to pull them aside and help them one on one is the best way to get them up to speed. Getting them to a point where they fit in is (in some, non cultural/political cases) often the best approach simply because it's easier to change one person than to force change on a large (already very functional) community.

But that's just my two cents...

Answer 3

Helpful is better

As the grumpy old man who may be the catalyst for this, I admit to carrying over some of my SE "feel" from a couple of other sites where we have some trouble with poor questions (Christianity.SE) and a lot of meta discussion on trying to find the balance between getting new users to adapt to our norms and finding folks who just won't adapt.

In this case, I did not look at the profile. (Oops, the tool is provided for a reason! RTFM, Korvin!) That's a good thing to do.

I perhaps over reacted, and should consider using the mode I tried to use at RPG.SE: try and get new participants to take the tour and get a feel for how SE / Q&A sites are indeed different from forums and chat rooms, etc.

It's worth the effort to not, as I noted during one RPG.SE meta discussion, promote what can be seen as latent hostility perceived by new users on some SEs within the standard SE format. (The origin of SE is in the low social skills (stereotype) sub culture of computer programmers). Each community establishes its norms to get the right feel, and I think I overstepped my bounds as a fairly new participant on this SE. (Hmm, may need to re fly that check ride).

Mea Culpa.