Closing questions because of the attitude of the asker

Question

Here, we have a vote to close on the grounds that

asker is rude to people trying to help him.

My instinctive reaction is that this is not a reason to close the question. Part of the purpose of Stack Exchange is to build up a repository of questions and answers. Even if the person asking today is rude, some polite person might want to know the answer tomorrow.

On the other hand, there is a strong tendency (which I largely support) to close questions that are just homework dumps. At the very least, such a question is likely to be met with "What did you try? Where did you get stuck?" (and quite likely by me). This also seems to be reacting to the attitude of the asker (laziness), rather than to actual content of the question. Also, many obvious homework questions are closed because "It is unclear what you are asking", which is often unhelpful: if somebody posts the question, "Can you prove that [some given language] is not regular?" it's manifestly clear what they're asking.

Are we being inconsistent here? I'm having a hard time separating these two cases in my head. I suppose the point is that most homework questions can be closed as being bad questions since either the answer is already widely available (e.g., reductions between NP-complete problems) or the question is so specific that nobody who doesn't have to do that particular homework will care about the answer.

Answer 1

Oh dear.

The first rule of rudeness is: don't engage. Flag and move on.

(The second rule of rudeness is “Jump to rule 1”.)

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“Asker is rude to people trying to help him” is not an appropriate close reason. The free-form close reasons under “off-topic” are not a place to write random comments — there's the comment facility for that. The free-form close reasons are meant to explain how a question does not fit the site. The prefilled text is “This question appears to be off-topic because it is about ” for a reason: you don't have to include it, but it gives you an idea of the sort of thing you're supposed to write.

Determining whether to close a question is based on the content of the question, not the attitude of the asker. The attitude of the asker may cause you to choose to close and move on rather than spend time editing the question or providing advice in comments — that's fine. But if you can't think of a close reason beyond the asker's attitude, the question doesn't need closing.

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Regarding the close reason for homework dumps, “unclear what you're asking” covers several different cases:

• the post is incomprehensible;
• there is insufficient information to answer;
• the post has clear statements but lacks an actual question.

Homework dumps tend to fall into that last case. They should, however, be accompanied by a comment telling the asker that they should tell us how far tehy got on their own and ask a specific question about the part where they are stuck.

A close reason that requires an additional comment which could be fairly generic is the whole point of custom close reasons, so maybe we should have one. This topic requires discussion though, so let's deal with it in a separate thread.