[ros-users] [Discourse.ros.org] [General] ROS Answers needs your help

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[quote="anfederman, post:25, topic:5147"]
So my question is what is the problem we are trying to solve? Is it to make sure every question gets a personal response?
[/quote]

At the high level the goal is to provide a place where people can go to get answers to questions they have about ROS systems. Users should be able to find questions and answers already there from past queries, and if their question hasn't already been asked they can ask for help.

To be able to make this happen effectively we need to make it easy for the community to know what questions are unresolved and are looking for answers. This is provided by the "Unanswered" filter.


If you are browsing through the site and find an Unanswered question that you know the answer to or can contribute to please take a minute or two to do so.

[quote="anfederman, post:25, topic:5147"]
However looking at them it seems 90% have at least one answer or some comments. So I wonder how many of the questions really are unanswered?
[/quote]

This is definitely an issue that would be good to improve the site quality. Unfortunately it's usually brand new users who are not familiar with the format and often don't know to accept an answer after it's provided and resolves their issue. Moderators/high Karma users can help with this somewhat, but a lot of it relies on the users and teaching new users how to use the site.

As a rule of thumb:

* If you have asked a question and your question has been answered, please accept the solution so that others know that your question is resolved and won't spend time trying to help you again.

* If you solve a problem that you asked about, please answer your own question so that others who have the same problem will be able to learn from your effort too.

* If your question turns out to be invalid or otherwise unanswerable, please close it with a comment so that others in the future who might have a similar issue can still benefit, and people volunteering their time don't spend time trying to answer your resolved question.

The most important thing I think for the site is to improve the quality of the questions. Good questions encapsulate the problem making it easy to help the user. The quality of the question is quite strongly correlated with the speed and completeness of the answer. Many questions that only include partial information for how to reproduce will get comments and requests for more information, or guessed answers but often end up in a limbo land where there's not enough information to answer the question. 

What can also be super valuable is to give advise on how to improve a question so that it can become answerable.

Overall this is a community driven website designed to be self sustaining. We all need to contribute a little bit to make it work. It's a resource that we all benefit from, please take a few minutes each week to try to answer at least one question. If everyone who visits the site did this this week there'd be no unanswered questions.





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