If downvoting a question, even those that are
well-intentioned, will help a new/Anonymous Monk learn
how to ask an educated question, then so be it.
I am very skeptical that downvoting a "newbie" question
will help its poster learn to ask questions well. A terse
response, with an admonishment to RTFM or
STFW (and perhaps pointers to the appropriate
parts of the FM or FW), gives the questioner an idea of
what they did wrong (failed to research their question) and
how to fix it (research their question next time). A link
to an appropriate node, or perhaps to
this
essay, is even better, but more work. (Ideally, every
monk would put all reasonable effort into educating the
novitiate, but let's face it: we don't have time.
Sometimes, RTFM is all we have time for.)
A lone downvote carries inadequate information: it says that "someone doesn't like your node", without saying why.
That makes it difficult feedback to learn from (can you
tell that I've an interest in machine learning? :-), and
the unfortunate novice who posts a stupid naive or
frequently asked question, only to see it downvoted into
oblivion, is more likely to leave in disgust than recognize
and correct their error.
So let's not pretend that we're doing someone a favour
by summarily downvoting their redundant nodes, okay?
--
:wq
