Is it just me or are we seeing an increase in questions from very low rep users (<10) asking questions that can usually be answered by looking in the help pages. Most of these questions are left unanswered or the answers that are given are ignored by the questioner.
Is there anything we can do to fix this or prevent it?
We are considering a new close reason of "general reference" as documented here:
general reference: this question is too basic; the answer is indexed in any number of general internet reference sources designed specifically to find that type of information.
For now, I recommend a diamond mod editing your FAQ to indicate that these sorts of questions are off-topic for your site and closing them as Not a Real Question.
If it becomes an epidemic then something else will have to be done, but getting your FAQ correct is quite critical.
In the GIS world Esri has the largest user base by far across all categories, including clueless and cluefull, lazy and industrious. Consequently as GIS.SE grows and attracts new users we'll see more "bad" questions, and the larger proportion of them will be about Esri products. In all human endeavour the ignorant outnumber the wise, this isn't a product-specific problem.
I think we just need to be vigilant and defend our turf, firmly but gently. I'll follow Jeff's suggestion about adding an item to the FAQ about general reference / trivially answered questions. Then people can vote to close questions and leave a comment pointing to the FAQ item as to why.
I happen to believe that there is no such thing as a stupid question. Even if it is a stupid question, we can provide a great answer, which should drive traffic to our site.
But those who think otherwise might be helped by this article.
I've noticed the same trend in my short time on GIS Stack Exchange. Finding some of the information in the documentation of some commercial and open source products can be extremely difficult or require a specialized skill set. So in some sense, asking questions that are difficult to find in the documentation may be reasonable.
To be fair, it's not just Esri users, but they seem to be the most common at the moment.
If we introduce any kind of "general reference" reason for closing, it would be more useful to require those voting to closing it to provide a link to the general reference (and a Google search link may not be sufficient since the results will change over time). If a link to the doc can't easily be found, maybe it shouldn't be closed.
Where the answer is basically "RTFM", I've been trying to provide the link to the documentation rather than example code. The problem is this may be creating a dependency where some users will ask others to RTFM on their behalf.
Also, I think the correct term for this particular phenomena would not be "RTFM", but rather "LTRTFM".
