This is going to be a bit of a long post, please bear with me. (And no TL;DR's ಠ_ಠ)
A decaffeinating story
Once upon a meta post, a legend from the realm of Manly soil rose and said: Let's decide on a homework policy. His voice echoed, and other heroes followed. But there were problems$\,\ldots$
Years later, IUPAC1 reminded us that we don't have as much as consensus as we thought we did.
Current situation
So, basically, back then the legends didn't act on what they should have since they couldn't. We now can though. Let me be less mysterious: These things (i.e. enforced site policies and stuff) should be decided by a community consensus based on evidence on how things turned out. This was impossible in a newborn chem.SE since we didn't know how things may fit well together and we decided to adopt some of the policies in other science SEs and math.SE.
But it's different now. Chem.SE is old enough to have rules that stand on their own. It has grown its own culture, and its own core of avid answerers and moderators (as in people who help clean up the site not mod mods). It has had its own ups and downs2.
The question
So out of all of this topsy-turvy, Mart the mod made the best sense:
In general I agree, that there is an issue with the homework policy. I don't think it is done by including waiting periods and/ or new rules. I think we have to rebuild homework guidelines from scratch.
Ooooh, since we still have to see if we agree there's a need for this reconstructing, I'm not asking for that yet. The aim of this post is to gather ideas from y'all on one important question:$$\color{#bb3333}{\mathrm{What} \mathbf{~is~} \mathrm{a~homework~question}?}$$
What should the answer look like?
I wish it was this easy to answer this question. But it's not. Well, of course
Calculate how much weight I will lose trying to understand this Wikipedia page.
is a homework question. But the problem is when you get practical. The way of asking and answering HW questions should be such that benefits the asker and the answerer and stops future unwanted consequences of accepting homework questions.
Practice has always been harder and more exotic than paper. For instance, the difficulties currently surrounding reaching an easy set of rules on HW questions is whether or not hints should be allowed in answers, or how much explanation would suffice.
You can mention one of these things in your answer in order to make it more useful and subjective to us:
- What do you imagine an ideal Q/A of homework to look like? The more detailed you present us with your ideas, the better. For example, should it have lots of comments? Should the answer be complete, or a hint, or a simple link to a tutorial? Should the answer be posted after the question gets comments? etc etc.
- Why should there be policies about homework? I could think of reasons like "Since I don't want to do homework for lazy all-nighters3." or "since I don't want to see them flood the site" (My reason this is, actually) or "since I want the OP to learn thoroughly" etc.
- There's recently a semi-natural boost in the number of
homework dumpsillegitimately and deceivingly queried low quality posts that do not demonstrate the real question the author has. (What? Blame this guy for that) Do we need something extra to prevent these posts from coming? - You tell me.
And one final request, $$\Large \text{We'd love to hear all ideas please.}$$
1: So he is called, for he's one of the first that actually understood IUPAC rules.
2: And some pop-corn-ish dramas. He-who-must-not-be-named, anyone?
3: All-nighter, if you're not familiar with the term, means someone who doesn't sleep the night before the exam because!