Back in June, my friend blogged about people showing off their Wikismarts to him. I envy him, because on the other side of the coin, there seems to be a plethora of people with zero initiative.
You know who I‘m talking about. The people who seem to have no filter in their brain and ask you every question that bubbles up to the murky surface of their minds, even if the current discussion has nothing to do with the question. These people regularly lurk on message boards and in IRC channels, just waiting to begin asking questions that would be better answered by a trip over to Wikipedia than waiting for someone else to prepare a (probably inaccurate) explanation.
There’s no excuse, really. Most browsers come with search forms built into the browser chrome itself. Even if not, Google (or one’s favourite search engine) is a single page-load away. There is no excuse to derail an existing conversation by asking for someone to explain what the topic of the conversation is all about. Go find out, come back, and show off those Wikismarts.
This isn’t much more than a short rant. It just flusters me, because I applaud those people’s curiosity, but I deplore their lack of initiative in an age where information access is literally at people’s fingertips.
Last updated Sunday, November 16, 2008 at 11:57 PM
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I discovered this website just now and thought of this post. Let Me Google That for You
Indeed, I heard about that via Lifehacker. It’s definitely a great thing to use in situations I mentioned above.
I would formally like to apologize for being one of those people.
I used to just find it more convenient to ask first and then look something up after nobody could answer me, which was strange logic. Now I‘m much more in tune with the powers of the internet. I’m teaching myself guitar, looking up supplementary study info, answering general A.D.D. queries through the power of google. So don’t worry, Ben. I’ll be bugging you for less useless information from now on.
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I think it has more to do with people being frustrated or (more often) clueless, I spend a lot of time in the jQuery and css channels (among others) on freenode because of some my internship and I‘m amazed a the questions people ask, because more often then not, the same things have been asked several times before and are available elsewhere online in several different places. But then I think, why do we have these channels? So people can ask easy, stupid questions.
The chat’s I‘m in sit idle around 50% of the time anyway and usually you can just prompt one of the IRC bots to tell them an answer if you really don’t feel like getting into things. You also have to think, a lot of people who ask questions, and I‘m going to say a large percentage, are new to web design or whatever topic they are interested in, so there’s a certain level of not knowing where to turn when things turn up.
And for me it’s just a matter of preference. Jquery documentation, for instance is horrible in some cases, so rather than have to muddle through that mess, I prefer to ask a direct question and get a direct answer.
Tuesday, November 18, 2008 at 3:17 PM