Joe Barta (in ) said:

| Morris Dovey wrote:
|
|| There's a terrific web page (I
|| have a link to it at http://www.iedu.com/c/) about how to ask
|| "smart questions".
|
| Geez... it's not a page, it's a whole course! Smart people crack me
| up sometimes. Seriously, what was the author thinking when he wrote
| such a thing? Seemed to me like a bit of intellectual masturbation.
| The only people who are going to suffer through all that mess
| probably already ask "smart questions".
|
| There, my crabbiness is back in full swing ;-)

I think it was originally written to deal with problems experienced in
some high volume technical newsgroups (I was referred to it in
comp.lang.c where there might have been 300+ posts/day) and one to
three dozen regulars providing 90% of the answers. It was when I
eventually became one of those regulars that I developed an
appreciation for the effort put into writing the guide (and added my
web page so that newbies could have a short list of links to
"cluefulness").

The How-To was so useful in helping technical forums be effective
providers of information that it's been translated into a bunch of
languages and has become an unofficial global standard. What's nice is
that it's a "read once" document. It doesn't take a lot of studying to
"get" what it says.

And no, when they're in a panic because the systems for which they're
responsible are behaving pathologically, even some /really/ smart
people don't seem to naturally ask "smart" questions...

--
Morris Dovey
DeSoto Solar
DeSoto, Iowa USA
http://www.iedu.com/DeSoto/solar.html