Policy on AMIRITE questions

Question

Intro

Consider two likely scenarios:

Q: How many grams of $\ce{O2}$ are there in one mole of oxygen gas?

I know that O is 16, so it should be 16 grams, AMIRITE? Please halp ugrant kthxbye

Q: How many grams of $\ce{O2}$ are there in one mole of oxygen gas?

I know that O is 16, so it should be 32 grams, AMIRITE? Please halp ugrant kthxbye

The major difference is that the OP got the answer wrong in the first, and right in the second. In the first case, there is something to be said, and in the second, there isn't. Let's call these questions 'AMIRITE' questions (i.e., 'Am I right' questions).

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The Issue

Our current — and certainly future — homework policy requires that at least questions that require some calculations and look like exercises from a textbook demonstrate some minimal effort done by the OP, to ensure the site doesn't become useless in an influx of homework questions by lazy OP's who can't bother to spell correctly.

Too little effort is harmful for the thread; but apparently, too much effort is as well. I've witnessed some questions that provide too much effort.

Take a look back at the second scenario. The answer is a yes, you're right! Is there anything to be said? Is there anything left to be said? Of course not, and seldom I have witnessed answers that do not quite match up to our quality standards and the answerer has tossed the argument I just provided. There's nothing to be said about the question, so the answer, albeit of poor quality, is meant to "close the case".

A similar outcome is a comment pointing out that the OP is right in their thinking, or wrong due to this one-line reason. Again, nothing is left to be said unless we delve into off-topic lands. At the best case scenario, we just end up with another question to throw at the heap of the unanswered.

When there's nothing to add to what the question already offers, there is no way the thread will garner good answers and result in a productive interaction, and one of the main reasons we close questions is to prevent bad answers from being given.

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Possible solutions

To prevent such misfires, we can

1. Close 'AMIRITE' questions as either homework, or dedicate a new slot to them. They're usually closed cases from the beginning anyway. We're just letting some of the other unanswered questions breathe.
2. Officiate self-answers or CW answers to AMIRITE questions. We would either notify the OP, or make a CW answer of our own that includes the answer the OP have provided themselves in the question body, and edit it out. After all, there isn't a need to provide effort in the question if the OP is providing a self-answer.
3. Another solution or a combination of the above.

So, what should be done? Let's discuss a policy for these.

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Side Notes

CW = Community Wiki
OP = Original Poster
AMIRITE = AMIRITE
Relevant discussion: What should be done with "Is my calculation correct ?"-type questions?

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$$\Huge \mathrm{AMIRITE}?$$

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Answer 1

I might as well get things started, to prove that others care too, you know...

My opinion can be summed up with a single image. This is not going to be a well-reasoned or well-organized argument, but a "me first" 5-espresso-fueled tiny rant.

Nuke them. Nuke them with extreme prejudice.

The questions themselves may be well-researched or show lots of "effort", which who knows what that means anymore. But most of the amirites I've seen are clearly homework, either plug-and-chug or introductory (general or organic chemistry) concepts that could be answered by 1. doing more practice problems, 2. finding a second textbook and re-reading the concept(s), or 3. coming to chat.

The point is that well-researched and lots of effort doesn't necessarily imply content that is useful for the site. And what do we want this site to be?

I know what I want this site to be. I don't want it to be a homework ghetto. I don't want it to be a clique of only the most elite either. I want those two to coexist without hurting one another.

Amirites will lead to a homework ghetto. They are even more shallow than "conceptual misunderstandings". Most importantly, I think that they can't be improved to provide information or insight that isn't somewhere else.

One "pro" (really a neutral point, though) for leaving them is that such questions probably won't come up in Google search results, at least with higher priority than the better content here. So then, what's the likelihood that these aren't one-off questions and will show up in someone's search results? If the questions are more general, then they can probably be edited to not be an amirite, then improved, etc.

This is part of my semi-secret crusade to blow up most homework. Can you tell I didn't like doing most of my own homework?

tl;dr Close most, especially rote calculations. If it can be edited to not be an amirite, do so.

Answer 2

TL;DR Close under HW policy

So, my stance is in the comment section.

My first thought is: close the question, but in the spirit of friendliness, we can still leave a comment saying "yes, you're right". What exactly do we want to close the question as? That depends on whether we want to dedicate a custom close reason to this, or whether we want to expand the homework policy to subsume such cases. I vote for the latter. This is very easy to phrase in the policy: "You must be facing an actual conceptual problem." or something along the lines of that will take care of this. Amirite people are not facing any conceptual problem, they just want a proofreader.

I think that this would be a waste of a custom close reason. This kind of questions are invariably homework-type, and by right, ought to be adequately dealt with by the homework policy.

The question therefore turns into: how do we phrase the HW policy, so that it draws a clear distinction between what we want to deal with and what we do not want to deal with? And obviously that further raises the issue of: what do we want to deal with?

That's a discussion for another time. For now, let's agree that

1. we don't want to deal with such questions
2. the HW policy should be modified to deal with it

If we want to implement this in the short term, before the HW policy is reworked, then we can simply add a "manual exclusion" line:

Questions to which the answer is simply "yes, you are right" will be closed.

My suggestion for the long term is in my comment:

You must be facing an actual conceptual problem.

Answer 3

Turn them into canonical questions, close as duplicates.

I personally am not a big fan of these kinds of questions, as they basically already violate our homework policy, which clearly states that a question shall be conceptual. (One of the points I would like to highlight in a revised version.)
If it is already fully answered, then there is not much to be done with them anymore.
On the other hand I personally don't like closing such questions, because they might be good worked examples. Additionally I don't want to discourage these questions as they provide a nice entry to the site in general and I'd rather check a calculation than doing all the work. Unfortunately as worked examples, they are not really helpful, if the underlying concepts are not equally well explained. In the long run, this would clutter the site and makes finding particular questions difficult.
As a solution to this, like was hinted in the meta question, we might consider turning them into canonical posts. (There have been rumours, that canonical posts for certain topics are planned already. One could use exceptional examples like these as a starting point.) Newer questions relating to the same concepts should then be closed as duplicates. In principle I would apply this to all kind of study-type questions.

With all that of course the common sense quality identifiers remain unchanged. If it is bad, simply down-vote and the system will take care of it eventually.