Is there anything else we can do to help newbies ask appropriate questions?

Question

Yes, this partly duplicates a lot of past discussion, but I felt it needed to be reopened. Feel free to shoot it down, ideally suggesting which old question should be revived.

At the moment we have four closed questions at the top of the list. I don't disagree with any of those decisions, and workplace is far from alone in having such bursts, but it's not a great look.

I know there's theoretically an onboarding document we want people to read, though I've never seen it. It's pretty clear that if it does cover these issues, people are not reading it, or at least are thinking it doesn't apply to them. Check boxes saying "I have read, and agreed to abide by, these rules" don't really seem to work, even when there is a script that requires all pages of the document to have appeared on screen before the box can be checked. Maybe it needs a TL;DR version that summarizes the rules, reduced to snappy bullet points in large bold italic (red?) font, with links to more detail as we have in the close menu?

If I was designing the stack exchange UI, I would be inclined to replace [closed] with a short reason, eg [closed: offtopic] or [closed: needs specialist advice], so even without viewing the question text folks can see what the issue was, understand our communal standards, and learn therefrom. Multiple reasons would also just look less hostile than [closed][closed][closed]. But given SE's speed of response to past suggestions, even if somebody who can make that change is reading this, I don't expect it to happen until several years out.

Is there anything else we can do without having to alter SE itself, or that they might actually accept as important, cheap, and urgent enough not to defer?

(Endless September, alas, does not mean that they're aren't more confused newbies in September...)

Answer 1

When are we going to finally reach the conclusion that more writing is not going to solve the issue? It doesn't matter where you put the text or how well it is summarized, the solution is never going to be giving people more things to read. Drop the reputation requirement for posting on meta and chatting so they can talk to people about the site and how it works before they post an "inappropriate" question. Forcing newbies to compose a post before they can get any feedback from a person on whether they're doing it right is just mean.

When we on-board someone at our company, we don't just throw a stack of documentation at them and lock them in a room until they've read it all, then have them start working and expect they'll do everything well because it's all right there in the documentation. Why would we expect that methodology to work here on a site full of volunteers and random strangers on the internet when it doesn't work when someone's paycheck is on the line?

Some people will never care about what is good for the site, but more people would care if they felt like part of a community instead of just an anonymous user with no connection to anyone here.