Consistent policy about downvoting and asking the OP to 'show what they have tried'

Question

I was struck by the difference in reaction to two questions that have a lot in common

https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/82894/how-to-build-this-table-in-latex

How to draw a sine wave on a circular path in tikz

Both questions have the tone of 'do-this-for-me', both have shown no effort from the OP, yet one received 15 upvotes and 4 answers, and one received 4 downvotes and was closed as too localized.

Does there need to be more consistency? Is there a policy somewhere?

Edit following the comments and answer

I agree that the table question is trivial.

The hard part of the curve question was the parametrization, which has nothing to do with TeX.

Of course, given how much reputation I have received from my answer, I certainly don't want to delete or migrate the question anywhere else, but the inconsistency troubles me:

• Draw this table - BAD!
• Draw this picture - GREAT!
• Construct this equation - BAD!

Thank you to @Kurt for pointing out that this is something of a special case (because of the OP's previous questions), but the ethos does sometimes feel like it follows the bullet points above.

Answer 1

I'm not entirely sure how "meta" works, so perhaps this isn't an answer.

My personal opinion is that consistency is important. To a new user of LaTeX, the distinction between what is trivial and what isn't might be difficult to make. Thus, when confronted by a pair of questions similar to those above, it might not be entirely clear what is "acceptable" to ask and what isn't.

With that in mind, I think that absolute consistency is impossible. Certainly, the same question posed by two different users might be handled differently. Had the table question been a first question, then it likely would have received a different response. Rather, it was asked by a user that should have known better and for whom nearly half of their ~20 questions (many of which were basically the same question) had been closed for the same reason.

In addition a zero effort "draw it for me" question will often pose a more interesting problem than a zero effort "make this table for me" question. I hope that it's not presumptuous to say that most of us are here because we find solving these problems entertaining and/or enjoy what we learn from them. When something interesting comes along, it's hard to resist the temptation to try to figure it out...regardless of how it's asked. The large base of graphics users will naturally lead to more interest in the graphics variety of this type of question.

As an educator, I deal with people wanting answers handed to them without putting in any effort themselves on a day to day basis (kids these days). Most of my time is spent trying to convince people that seeing the answer is only really useful after having struggled to find it themselves. So on the one hand, I come from that perspective. On the other, I enjoy a good problem as much as the next guy and some of the few answers I've provided on this site are to questions that haven't shown any effort on the part of the asker.

In short, all of the people who answer questions bring different things to the table and have different motivations for doing so. That's what allows for such a great variety of answers here, but also what would prevent any unified policy on what "should" be answered from being enforceable and therefore useful.

\end{ramble}

Answer 2

This is really just a long comment. I know that a question like this would pop up in meta after a series of do-it-for-me (especially those related to drawing) questions that were answered and got very high number of upvotes. I have asked myself this very same question.

The following are my take on this issue.

• We should be consistent with the post-an-MWE comment. Although some problems are non-trivial like the How to draw a sine wave on a circular path in tikz (where, incidentally, I was the one who posted the comment, but the first to answer and whose answer got accepted), posting this comment will in one way or another convince them to try working out the problem on their own first. In many cases, I have seen OP edit the question to include and MWE after posting such a comment.
• My principle in answering these kinds of questions, even the ones the normal TeX users find difficult or consider as one-time problems (for which case they might find reading the whole manual impractical) is my answer should encourage them to answer the rest of the problem on their own by using my answer as a sort of a springboard. A high school teacher myself, I completely agree with Scott H's opinion about the value of putting one's effort in the learning process. That is why I have opted to post an incomplete solution (or in some other cases, a tutorial on how to go about it without actually doing all the job). Although I would admit that doing the whole thing would have been, personally, very fun.
• Some do-it-for-me questions are very trivial. What the OP needs in most of these cases is to read a beginner's LaTeX manual. In these questions, it is appropriate to direct OP to the proper links or previous posts, closing some of them appropriately as duplicates. (While one can argue that anyone should read the manual first in all cases, I don't think that it always works for some specialized packages like the graphical packages whose manuals run to more than several hundred pages.) In the case of How to build this table in latex, though, it is obvious that the OP has not given much of anything at learning at table construction as can be seen in OP's previous posts. I think that closing that question has been justified.

Answer 3

I think

• Draw this table BAD!
• Draw this picture GREAT!
• Construct this equation - BAD!

is the site rule.

We have tons of just-do-it-for-me picture questions which are largely upvoted, even if asked by old users.

Whereas just-do-it-for-me tables are usually downvoted. This one, for example, was sensibly dowvoted two times: Create table question.

The same for just-do-it-for-me equations. This one, for example, was sensibly dowvoted two times before being deleted by owner: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/469824/i-would-like-to-learn-how-to-write-equation-in-latex.

This inconsistent behavior is completely inexplicable to me.