Is there such thing as a “dumb” question? This question has always been asked in school growing up and it always received the same two answers depending on an individual’s point of view on it. Some would say that there isn’t such thing as a “dumb” question and some would say there is but most times it leaned towards that there are “dumb” questions. My view on this is that to classify on whether a question is appropriate depends on the context of when the question is asked and how it is asked. And how would you determine if a question is appropriate? Well, the answer is in the question itself.
To see various differences in questions and to telling which ones are good and which ones are bad are the content and understandability of the question. You can see and compare questions from Stack Overflow, which is a forum type website where anyone(mostly programmers) can go and either ask questions or answer them.
Searching on the website I quickly found some examples that compare a good and a bad question. Here is an example of a question that can be considered decent to a smart question:
Q: What is the correct JSON content type?
I've been messing around with JSON for some time, just pushing it out as text and it hasn't hurt anybody (that I know of), but I'd like to start doing things properly.
I have seen so many purported "standards" for the JSON content type:
application/json
application/x-javascript
text/javascript
text/x-javascript
text/x-json
But which is correct, or best? I gather that there are security and browser support issues varying between them.
I know there's a similar question, What MIME type if JSON is being returned by a REST API?, but I'd like a slightly more targeted answer.
This question is very brief and easy to understand and as we look to the description of the what the user posted for the question they point out what they are trying to look for immediately with an example. Along with asking the question, the user goes farther and asks more directly for a specific answer by providing a link to another question similar to his/her question by specifying what he/she is asking the user’s own question. With this, other people are able to easily answer directly to the question being ask.