There has been some discussion of introducing a new close reason, “general reference”:
This question is too basic; it can be definitively and permanently answered by a single link to a standard internet reference source designed specifically to find that type of information.
This close reason is currently available on two Stack Exchange sites: English Language and Usage and Science Fiction and Fantasy. The return from experience is mixed: it's useful sometimes, but has a huge potential for abuse.
I've written my opinion on general reference as a close reason on the main meta; here's a quick summary. I disagree with Google as a benchmark for declaring a question unworthy of the site, because it is harder to find relevant search results when you have no idea of what the answer is, and most importantly it is very hard to evaluate whether the search results are reliable and give a complete picture.
A far better metric (and this is the way we apply closing as general reference on SF&F, and the way we use “too localized” in the absence of “general reference” on French Language and Usage) is to look up the obvious keyword in the obvious reference. Wikipedia is the obvious reference in many cases (on French SE, “any dictionary would give the answer” is the usual metric).
So let me look up median. It's all about statistics, the article doesn't have the word “array” anywhere. Ok, maybe it's in another article listed on the disambiguation page. Hmmm, no.
Now let me try your Google search. The top results for me are:
- http://stackoverflow.com/questions/251781/how-to-find-the-kth-largest-element-in-an-unsorted-array-of-length-n-in-on — irrelevant (or rather, tangentially relevant, but does not contain the answer)
- http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10662013/finding-the-median-of-an-unsorted-array — the same question, asked 6 hours ago, on another Stack Exchange site
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selection_algorithm — this article does have the answer, but it is a bit hard to follow if you aren't familiar with the topic.
- http://chinmaylokesh.wordpress.com/2011/03/01/order-statistics-general-find-the-kth-smallest-element-from-an-unsorted-array-in-linear-time-specific-find-median-of-unsorted-array-in-linear-time/ — has code, but defers to Wikipedia for an explanation, and besides this is a blog article that could go away at any time
- http://www.careercup.com/question?id=8462973 — another questions and answers site, where the answers (all unrated) contain such gems as “e do 1 parse of the array and make a Search tree out of it. This takes O(n) time.”
So I disagree that this question is too easy for this site. It doesn't show a lot of effort — I do agree that the asker should have at least been able to find the Wikipedia page on selection algorithms — but it is a legitimate question.
I strongly object to your remark that “OP is too new in CS”. There is nothing wrong about being new to CS, this site is about computer science at all levels. Please read
- http://meta.cs.stackexchange.com/questions/34/are-questions-on-introductory-undergraduate-cs-theory-appropriate-here
- http://meta.cs.stackexchange.com/questions/123/how-to-promote-inclusive-behavior
- http://meta.cs.stackexchange.com/questions/78/how-to-make-our-cs-community-very-different-from-the-cstheory (and in particular Shog9's answer)
