How do you treat questions that are either so incomplete or so grammatically incorrect that it is hard to guess the author's intent? Ex. "How does a graph of x vs. y from equation?" Guess? I would feel bad deleting them.

1 Answer
Oct 7, 2015

That depends.

Explanation:

This is indeed a fairly common problem on Socratic, especially with older questions.

As a rule of thumb, if you feel like you can make something out of an incomplete question, by all means, go for it.

For your example, you could use a general problem to help students understand how a graph of something vs. something else would look like for a given equation.

Most of the time, contributors will try to make educated guesses as to what the intent of the student who posted the question was. Many math problems, for example, have multiple answers that address possible interpretations of the problem.

So it all depends on what you as a contributor want.

I'm not sure what you mean by "deleting them", though. Delete the questions? Contributors can't delete questions and answers, as that would be something very difficult to supervise.

If you feel like a question is unanswerable, as some are, unfortunately, give one of the five heroes an @mention and we'll come check it out, see whether or not the question should be deleted.