Re^2: To help not to misguide

[c_chipster]

This node falls below the community's threshold of quality. You may see it by logging in.

[revdiablo]

Yes, people who post wrong answers don't know that fact themselves and didn't mean to cheat others, but at least they know whether they are good at particular areas. ... So at least keep quiet.

Sorry, but discussion is what this Perlmonks is about. Sometimes a wrong answer teaches more than 15 correct answers. If you expect every answer to be spot-on, you've come to the wrong place.

Update: based on the, *ahem*, discussion beneath this post, I thought I should clarify my position a bit. I do not think we should encourage or approve of answers that are either intentionally wrong, purposefully misleading, or woefully uninformed. But that's different from simply incorrect. The former should be condemned, for sure, but the latter should be accepted as a cost of discussion, and dealt with in a constructive way (e.g. explaining why it's wrong).

[Happy-the-monk]

For example, in that ugly thread about Oracle. I trust that most of the monks here, including myself, never used Oracle, as it is not free. So at least keep quiet. With a DB like Oracle, even if you have worked as a application programmer, you still don';t know much about the DB...

I am very sorry that I don't seem to get the point and not keep quiet either:
I haven't seen so many answers in the named OT thread. And although one of them isn't what the OP asked for, it was no bad guess that it might have been useful to him. We learned that it wasn't after all, but the answering monk had to try first.

I learned something from that answer too, so I am grateful for that.

I also checked: none of the notes in that thread are in Best Nodes of the day, so your claim that it was all for reputation doesn't stand the test of the monks.

As a side note on using Oracle: While you're right about Oracle not being free, I have never had to pay for it. Every time I've been asking Oracle for a copy or license as a developer, telling them what I intended to do, I got one for free for the time I was needing it. They have a developer network and they have a user group programme, and they are either too curious or too kind, it seems, to deny you a copy when you ask them politely.

PS: or did you mean the trollbitten oracle thread? You didn't say.

Cheers, Sören

[demerphq]

I think you have some misconceptions operating here. First off, XP is a property of users, reputation is a property of postings. Replys don't get XP, the author of the reply gets XP based on the node-reputation votes that occur.

Second, I think it was you who threw the tantrum in the oracle thread. (If not then I apologise unreservedly.) You made a comment there that said something along the line of "the original poster has been cheated". Well, when you come to a community site and ask for help of volunteers (which is what you are doing by coming here pretty much) you get what people are willing to give, and whatever it is its more than you started with and you paid nothing, so to say someone was cheated indicates that you fundamentally don't understand what a community help site is about.

If you want to be in a position where you can rightfully claim you have been cheated then go find some hot-shot perl programmer and PAY THEM TO HELP YOU. Don't come to a self help community and then throw a freaking tantrum over the perceived quality of the responses, especially not when the question doesnt actually directly pertain to the sites chosen subject.

I also think its worth pointing out that the response given wasn't wrong. It may have been glib, but it wasn't wrong. It basically said "have you turned on automatic error reporting" and implied "if you have and aren't getting an error then there probably wasn't an error". And as perrin was apparently correct, there was no error and the matter had nothing to do with perl.

Lastly, while it may annoy you to read "incorrect answers" it annoys the community much much much more when some troll posts a bunch of personal attacks and ignores that they are all getting reaped for being bullshit noise. If anybody did anything wrong here it was you. (earlier caveat about it not being you applies :-)

[tirwhan]

I trust that most of the monks here, including myself, never used Oracle, as it is not free.

Depending on your definition of free, you are wrong. Take a look here, and you will see that you can download the latest edition of Oracle for free, under a development license. Personally I prefer to use software that's not just free for development but also production use and modification of course, but that's just me.

<snarky>So why don't you stop XP-mongering with false information :-)?</snarky>

[blazar]

But it becomes different when a wrong answer got "confirmed" by XP points. Let's don't say that XP point is nothing, it is something. Lots of learners will judge the merit of the answers base on XP points.

And indeed it seems to me that whereas it occasionally happens that what I consider to be "bad" replies (or more generally, posts) get a higher reputation than I think (but who am I to impose my pov on the community?) they would deserve, patently wrong answers get heavily downvoted - so the system may well not be perfect, but who/what is after all? (BTW: if we all were, then nobody would ever post wrong replies!) However it fundamentally works most of the time.

PS: sorry for all those parentheses. (Seriously, eh! ;-)