As a wis.dm "refugee" I'm having some trouble breaking my questions out of the binary "yes or no" format. Any tips to help snap me out of it?
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I’m having the same problem.
I am pretty content with sticking with yes-or-no.
@Ivan at least give it a shot, ask a question.
Thanks for making the effort!
Ooh, look, you just did it now! Congrats!
Remember, you don’t always have to ask questions. I don’t ask many questions at all. In fact, I was typing one about hunting down a strange beep in my compy, and I investigated and found it (it was the new Windows Live messenger).
I think the best way to learn about the flavour here is to sit back and watch some of the questions come in. You can also browse the archives to see what’s been talked about before.
@J0E I am giving it a shot, but I am not comfortable with asking a question yet.
I’m curioius. It sounds like you used to ask yes or no questions all the time. What happened? A lot of yeses and nos, or did you get any discussion going?
As I said here.
What is a chocolate chip cookie? = bad question
Do you like chocolate chip cookies? = tolerable question
How do you keep chocolate chip cookies from sticking to the cookie sheet when baking them? = good question
@daloonagain Wis.dm used to be entirely Yes-or-No. Then some things changed and we were offered more question formats, but a lot of us still just stuck to primarily asking Yes-or-No questions. However, most questions weren’t intended to just be answered with a Yes or No, they were intended to start discussion. Most of the activity took place in the comments, not the answers themselves.
I think the longer you hang around, the more you’ll get used to non-yes/no questions. You can also try a yes/no as the question, but use the details to make it clear the question is wider than that until you are better with the more open stuff.
Not a mod, they may not like that idea.
I have noticed that Wis.dmers tend not to use the details. We use the details to kind of flesh out the question, to suggest, in more depth, what kind of answer we want, or to tell a story the illustrates where you’re going, or even your own answer to the question (if it’s a question about events in someone’s life).
Think of it as a conversation, there’s something you’re curious about and you want to ask your friends, you don’t try to put it in a yes or no format, just ask the question (like you did by asking THIS question). Think of Fluther more as a community sharing advice, information, opinions, theories, etc. It’s kind of like if you wanted to ask your boss something or you wanted to ask your friend something, you’d probably ask that question in a very different way, just think of it as less formal and structured, like throwing it out there.
And welcome aboard, it’s a lot of fun here.
I can’t speak for all wis.dmers, but I have been asking Y-N questions so long that it is very difficult for me to phrase a question in any other way, even in ‘real’ life.
Thank you for working to fit into this site, which is clearly very different from wis.dm.
From the flurry of questions asked by new arrivals, it appeared to me, as you said above, that the questions were merely jumping off points for discussions.
On Fluther, questions are posed to elicit answers and input most of the time. There is even a limit on how many questions a user can pose in a 24 hour period.
I thought your question above was a great example of how to do it. Perhaps a little more in the Details section most of the time, although I thought this question was quite clear as posed.
Welcome to the collective!
You might try asking your questions in a more converstaional tone… dont thnk about the format… just think about how you would ask a friend for advice… (not necesarily advice of course. any question will do)... I’m willing to bet most of your questions in every day conversation are not in “yes” or “No” format.
I find yes and no questions to be so lacking in point. I personally value the reason they choose yes or no behind the simple fact of their answer. Seeing their justification for their answer leads to asking more questions and having more discussions versus sitting at the final yes/no tally.
@dynamicduo Yes, we all agree. No one at wis.dm ever really cared about the yes/no tally. We just use the questions as discussion starters.
@dynamicduo Actually, dynamic…it WAS a Y/N question!! As a veteran wis.dmr I am highly trained to search out and destroy all non Y/N questions along with their users, and that was a legit Q! :) I have to admit, it’s going to be hard…sometimes that was a fun part of the challenge—you had to get creative sometimes.
Well thought out questions, even those in a (strictly speaking) yes/no format are fine. For example:
Do you like music? – Not so great.
Do you have any music recommendations for a Reggae fan? – Perfectly fine. Obviously, this is technically a yes/no format, but clearly designed to elicit a different type of answer.
@augustlan: that could easily become:
What music recommendations do you have for a Reggae fan?
Not yes or no at all.
@augustlan—that’s all we asked for, was to frame the question, even complicated ones—say in Science or Technology—in such a way that people could tag it Y/N and move on, or jump in and comment. Maybe there are some misconceptions about the kinds of questions we asked on Wis.dm?
@DutchCat I think there are some misconceptions. Wis.dm questions were never intended to be simple polls.
We still see a lot of good quality yes or no questions here though designed to ilicit a response. One might ask, “Do you believe the plan Obama announced today to buy up troubled assets from banks will have its intended effect?” In the details you might then spur the discussion further by summarizing the plan and/or adding a link to a story about it. One COULD answer just yes or no, it IS a valid question and a good one, and it WILL spur discussion/debate. Now, no one has posted that particular question, it’s just an off the top of my head example, but I’d say if you want to know something, it doesn’t really matter if the initial question is asked in a yes or no format, just one expects that the answers will by and large not simply be yes or no…there should be some meat to the questions. The only big change, we’re not really into “polls” here so much, we want the bigger debate, it seems more to me like the differences are in the form and craft of how one solicits the intended response. Just like there is no wrong way to eat a Resse’s, there’s no wrong way to ask a question here, as long as the question is not something one can find a concrete answer to with Google…if it’s worded in a way to ilicit a response, it seems that even if you’re in the habit of phrasing questions that can be answered as yes/no, but which are meant to spur further discussion, the ultimate goal is the same.
@dalepetrie For the most part, the questions were thought provoking…in fact, I’m sure that Peacethinker on Wis.dm has posted something very similar to your question example above. Thing is, I don’t get much into politics ‘cause I don’t like ‘em. I may go in and look around to see what people are saying, and learn something along the way, but I generally don’t participate in the comments.
Benny and the Brianiacs are liable to ask some mind blowing questions in the Technology and Science themes….I try to keep up with them, as those are the kinds of things I’m interested in, and I’ve learned a LOT from them!
I guess my thought is…...if someone asked, “Can you tell me why we can’t go faster than the speed of light…” Well, sure that can be googled, but if someone asks it, there is someone else looking at it who may say to themselves, “Hm. I never thought of that before.” and they get into it and start reading and commenting—it’s not something they would have gone out of their way to find….but, you know, if those are your rules, we need to abide by them….I think I can figure out ways around it…..I think. What would be another way to ask the Speed of Light Question?
@dalepetrie and yes…we ask to spur further discussion. Same animal, different colors.
@DutchCat – I don’t see anything wrong with the speed of light question the way it is phrased, I think that would be passable, as would “Why can’t we go faster than the speed of light?” Or “Why do you believe we can’t go faster than the speed of light?” Or “What scientific theory best describes why you think we can’t go faster than the speed of light?” Or “Do you believe we can’t go faster than the speed of light, or do you think we just haven’t theorized how it would be possible yet?” Basically, whatever you’re trying to get at, be direct…what do you really want to know? A bad question here would be “what is the square root of 24?” It’s really only going to be balked at if the question has no chance of iliciting a discussion.
@DutchCat – I guess I see this as stripping off a layer. I think if you were trained to ask questions that would generate discussions, but which FIRST needed to be answered in a Yes/No format, I would say you’re simply living under a constraint that doesn’t exist here, but there is no explicit rule AGAINST formatting your questions in that way. I think it’s more a matter of “can the question ONLY be answered in a Y/N” (bad question) vs. “can the question be answered as a Y/N, or can it be answered in some other way, or if it DOES require a Y/N response, does it welcome an explaination of that Y/N” (good question). In your example, I’m assuming you would have phrased the speed of light question as “Can you tell me why…”, people would have answered Y if they thought they could, and they would provide answers explaining their understanding if they chose to do so. Nothing different here, except most people won’t bother to answer “no”, they’ll simply not answer the question. The idea that the question might get missed by people who could answer it is largely a condidtion dependent on how well you choose the topics, because we all put our interests and Fluther lets us know if there are questions which meet our topic interests. We can also look at newly posted questions if we are looking for more questions than Fluther suggests to us, and we can add topics of interest to our profile if we feel we are missing relevant questions. But this being an intellectually curious community, if someone saw a question phrased as “can you tell me….”, if they had an opinion, or facts which were relevant to that question, chances are they would share. Again, using your example, yes, you can find all sorts of essays, scientific papers, etc. to “answer” the question, but the goal here is to tap the collective, see what we think and what ideas we have to share. I say it’s the same goal, just less formal, without that added requirement. I don’t think if you were to continue to ask questions generally the way you were used to asking them, you would run afoul of the rules I guess is my bottom line, and I think you will get used to the culture quickly and start to see how other people phrase their questions.
Well….about a year ago wis.dm broke out all of these different “scenes”, man, and opened up many different ways of asking questions….no longer limited to Y/N. Also, you didn’t HAVE to answer Y/N before you could comment. Yes, it’s what we were used to, and it had challenges of it’s own! But we had thousands of great discussions, on many, many topics. The Y/N format did not preclude discussion….we’ll figger it all out!
I’m sure you will, welcome!
@johnpowell You said, “How do you keep chocolate chip cookies from sticking to the cookie sheet when baking them? = good question”—easy answer…don’t use a baking sheet! :)
It just takes some work retraining yourself. It was hard for me when I was first on “that other site” to learn to just ask yes or no questions, to phrase everything that way, now I can’t seem to stop doing it that way. But maybe the basics might be a good place to start think: “What, where, when and how.” Start a question with one of those words and I think we’ll start to get the hang of it.
I mean to say the basics “What, when, where, how and why.”
Thanks for the welcome everyone!
Yeah I can’t do it either JPS.
For those who say they can’t do it, I say, why don’t you think of a couple questions you want to ask, and then put them in this discussion. The collective can tell you if that question is OK as it stands, or how we might change it and why…that might help you acclamate.
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