Introducing the Ask Wizard: Your guide to crafting high-quality questions
We know asking your first question on Stack Overflow can be a bit intimidating. Whether you are a new user on the platform or have been on the site for many years, crafting your question takes time and effort. Well, have no fear, the Ask Wizard is here to help you ask the perfect question.
The Ask Wizard provides step-by-step instructions to first-time askers to ensure they can create high-quality questions from the start.
How does the Ask Wizard work?
Automatically displayed for first-time question-askers, the Ask Wizard is split into several steps, each of which provides instructions to help make sure questions are high quality and benefit the entire Stack Overflow community.
The steps are eventually combined into a thoughtful, Stack Overflow ready question. Check out these screenshots to see how the Ask Wizard is organized and works to help you create a great question.
How do question-askers benefit from the Ask Wizard?
We’ve heard from both new and existing Stack Overflow users about the challenges of asking high-quality questions on our sites. With the Ask Wizard, we’re simplifying question-asking by including many of the best practices we’ve heard from the community on how to ask a good question.
We’re hoping that asking a question can turn from a potentially intimidating experience into one that is more approachable and even fun.
How does the Community benefit from the Ask Wizard?
The Ask Wizard will improve the quality of questions on our site and help avoid duplicate questions from being asked on Stack Overflow.
After testing the Ask Wizard, we also found it improved question completion rates and reduced the percentage of questions that were deleted.
Ultimately, the Ask Wizard will lead to better questions and overall site experience for the entire community.
How do I get started with the Ask Wizard?
The Ask Wizard will be automatically displayed to first-time question-askers on Stack Overflow. Experienced askers can also toggle it on or off and create questions through the Ask Wizard.
How can I learn more about the Ask Wizard?
To learn more about the Ask Wizard feature, check out this Help Center article.
Let us know what you think about the Ask Wizard on Meta or by commenting below.
Tags: ask wizard, community, new features, public Q&A
7 Comments
How does this wizard avoid duplicate questions from being asked? It seems like it’s just providing the same list of “possible duplicates” that the old form did.
I certainly wouldn’t consider a multi-page, multi-step process “simpler” than the old form, or somehow less intimidating.
Desperately awful. It pushes new users into putting their entire question into the title. This often means it gets truncated and they just repeat it in entirety in the question body without any extra value.
What would make more sense for a site such as unix.stackexchange.com – in my opinion, of course – is to capture the question body as a response to a directed series of questions such as “What problem are you trying to solve?”, “What code illustrates the problem?”, “What error messages or other output do you receive?”, “What have you tried in order to resolve the issue?”, and of course “What UNIX version or Linux distribution are you using?”. There’s little rocket science here; these are fairly standard diagnosis questions.
You can then ask for a simple summary, with a suggestion not to exceed (say) eight words, and pop that into the question title.
I think the point of the Ask Wizard is to add just enough friction to discourage those terrible questions that have vague titles and content that consists of little more than some code and some barely decipherable description of what’s wrong.
“The Ask Wizard provides step-by-step instructions to first-time askers to ensure they can create high-quality questions from the start. ”
I do not want to be harsh, but this is a purely marketing shallow statement suggesting that the author does really understand what high-quality means or cares about their reputation.
I feel this is very very basic, you don’t need a “wizard” for it, you could just have a sentence saying something like “Create a clear title, describe the problem and the steps to reproduce it, tell the community about the solutions you’ve tried so far”. That’s it.
While I agree it is basic it doesn’t seem to stop vast amounts of trash or duplicate questions from being asked. Anything like this can attempt to help people asking questions.
After activating it, I’m no longer able post a question, all SO tabs freeze when I open “ask question” page.
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