Does it really matter how you ask a question? Of course! For both the person seeking answers and the people answering them, asking questions the right way is essential, especially in an open source community. For a software engineer, effective communication is an imporant skill to exchange knowledge and communities, such as StackOverflow, clearly show this. On StackOverflow, people are constantly exchanging questions and answers to help each other as a part of the open source community. By seeking help in such a community, you are relying on other people and as such, want to make it easier to assist you. This means keeping the questions clear and concise, which will also assure the most relevant response that you want. You are also expected to have done your own research beforehand. When you don’t ask a question the smart way, you will not only make the community less efficient and waste time, but may also recieve irrelevant or negative responses.
Here is an example of a smart question(asked in a smart way): https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10403138/what-is-the-purpose-of-the-role-attribute-in-html?rq=1
In this example, a user asks “what is the purpose of the ‘role’ attribute in HTML?” In the details, the user clearly shows his related experience and proves that he had done his own research. This include providing 3 different examples of code where role attributes are used, along with a list of roles and his experience looking through it. Doing this helps people respond effectively without including unnecessary information and examples that the user would already know of. He also further breaks down his question into 4 more technical questions. This gives other users a clear understanding of what the asker is looking for and the responses he expects. In response to this question, users provided detailed answers that directly corresponds to the question without any irrelevant or vague information. The question and response also displays high level of recognition in the community with 817 and 740 upvotes respectively.
Below is an exmaple of a bad question(asked in the not smart way): https://stackoverflow.com/questions/25165563/what-is-html-role-attribute?noredirect=1&lq=1
This example is a direct contrast to the “smart” example above, as the user asks the same question, but in a bad way. In the details of his question, he includes “Can anybody explain to me the HTML role attribute, and please don’t confuse me with w3.org’s definition because Im not able to understand that.” This question lacks any real details to the subject and was also posted 2 years after the “smart” example, which proves the user’s own lack of research. As such, the only response he received was to “Google a little?” along with a link to the “smart” example. This recieved -5 votes showing the clear negative response and lack of regard the community has towards questions such as these. Ultimately, questions asked in a smart way are more likely to receive accurate and clear responses, while questions that aren’t only prove to waste everyone’s time.