How should question bodies be organized?

Question

The format that I know for question bodies is:

Intro, often explaining where the problem originated.

A problem statement explaining what the code is supposed to do.

Perhaps a little more context or explanation about the code, possibly including how the problem is to be solved, e.g. a sorting problem might be solved by quicksort or bubble sort.

File.name

The code itself.

Any further thoughts on the code, particularly questions that the author is considering.

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However, in this question, the question was edited so that the "further thoughts" section is now between the problem statement and code rather than after the code. This is problematic since that section is referring to the code in such a way as to suggest that someone should have read it by then.

There are several problems with the question that I would like to fix:

• I'd move the "further thoughts" section back to the bottom.
• Remove "(beginner)" from the title and add beginner.
• Remove "Thank you." from the migrated text.

But rather than start an edit war, I figured I'd seek consensus before reverting the previous change.

Answer 1

Honestly, as long as it's all there, I don't mind the order of things. Especially if headers or other methods of formatting are properly used to keep it all tidy.

Questions should contain a problem statement, code and a bit of an explanation. The problem statement should be up front for best readability, IMO. The other two, there's pros and cons to either coming second and the other third.

If the code comes before the explanation, the explanation makes more sense. If the explanation comes before the code, the code makes more sense.

So, does the order matter? Not for me. Just read the entire question twice. With most questions I got to do that anyway to make sure I didn't miss anything important.

What we really shouldn't do, is enforce a specific order. Posting on Code Review is complicated enough for new users so let's not make it more complicated by enforcing something that simply doesn't matter much in the grand scheme of things.

I agree with your list of items that should be in a question. I agree with the problem statement coming first. A filename above the code is helpful the moment multiple files are used. Afar from that, I don't see a reason to mind the order much.

Answer 2

There is one scenario where I think it makes sense to move the problem statement to the top. If a question starts with code and the description is below it. In this case such a question simply looks weird on the question page because it doesn't have any description but an ellipsis ... like this one:

...unless it was intentional but I doubt it.