How can we improve our How to Ask page?

Question

I've been crawling in the unanswered questions page for some cleaning and I did close a bunch of questions as unclear what you're asking. The notice for this close reason links to How to Ask and I feel we can probably improve its wording to something more specific to our site.

Specially for subjective question, saying again that links to search results are necessary, for code question a Minimal reproducible exemple, for docker question, the full dockerfile (as it has been often enough the problem was elsewhere in the file than the excerpt show in the question).

Do you see other points to add and how would you wrote them ?

Answer 1

After viewing the "How to ask" page the following improvements could increase value of this page:

1. Link it more prominently on the community landing page; I must admit I have discovered it for the first time exactly because it appeared in the "Blog" section in the right upper corner

2. Use bold for headlines to make increase readability

3. Link to the tags page in the part where you recommend to search and explore.

4. Why not introduce examples DO's as prominent questions (bullets with links) and examples of DON'Ts - like a list of antipatterns and offtopic

To 4, some brainstorming (note we might ourselves need some iterations towards alignment on these):

DO's

• Report problems about combinations of tools and environments; single tool questions might be better placed in a community decicated to that tool. Also, pure programming questions are off-topic here.
• Establish if not obvious how answer you look for could help you increase value, or reduce cost
• Mention background of your role regarding this task, e.g. what are trying to accomplish
• Use code examples, or Gist, or even a small example GitHub with a Dockerfile project if it would help to test your setup
• Use formatting
• If you are not sure after considering this list, ask in Meta first

Examples for good questions: 1. 2. ..

DON'Ts (compilation of mostly frequent deleted off-topic questions)

• Avoid asking technical questions without code examples/detailed information about used environment.
• Post unformatted code

Answer 2

Given the breadth and scope of DevOps, I think this site should be more tolerant of a wider range of questions. Tool usage and development is straightforward, but more subjective questions about culture and practice are absolutely relevant to DevOps.

Perhaps to keep it from being an opinion free-for-all, we could ask that users keep to their own direct experience when asking about fuzzier, more subjective topics?