I've seen several cases of new SO users getting their 1st question closed, and it really irritates me. In all cases, closing the question was totally justified (unclear, too general, etc.). I often feel that this shuns away new users and gives them a negative idea about SO, and that they feel it's a place for "experts" (whatever that means). There is at least one example of a user complaining here, on meta, that several of his questions were closed for such reasons.
In my experience, SO is a wonderfully greeting community provided that you start asking proper questions (e.g. per the FAQ on how to ask questions). In many cases, new SO users have never asked questions online, or are used to communities that deal poorly with "bad" questions, or target such audiences.
I found a another question addressing this topic as proposing a new closing reason: "OP needs to learn how to ask questions".
When I see a poor question from a user with low reputation, I usually check that user's profile to see if it's their first or second question. If so, I refrain from down voting the question and/or voting to close. Instead, I usually explicitly tell the user that their question is poorly worded if they don't reword their question, it will probably get closed by other users.
I think the real problem here is not so much the new users. There will always users who don't know how to ask for help.
The real problem is the typical reaction of experienced SO users: silently down vote and/or close. In busy times, the question may get closed in under a minute. We need to find a better way to address these questions by targeting people who down vote/close the question too quickly.
I keep a set of links to answer some common problems:
- Poor questions: "Check out guidelines on how to ask a good question."
- Partial code listings with too much missing code: "Please provide a short, self-contained, complete example, so that we can reproduce the problem."
- New users: "Make sure you find out how to accept an answer."
I'd like to get some similar link as "Please don't close new users's questions just quite yet." that reminds people that new users should be encouraged to edit their question and reformulate it to get a good answer.
Can you provide a good external link that explains to experienced SO that we need to encourage the user to reformulate the question instead of just closing it silently. Or, alternatively, can you provide a short and sweet text right here that I can link to?
Looking a bit harder, I've also found a related question that suggests editing a newbie's question to help them understand how to ask for help. This is one possible question to link to. Any other ideas?