<p>I've seen a spate of questions of a form more or less along the lines of "Is this working correct?" just lately.</p>

<p>While this is good from the point of view that the poster is clearly making a proper attempt, the difficulty is that if the answer is "yes", there's often nothing else to say, which means (unless you're creative enough to find <em>something</em> worthwhile to add) to post an answer (basically amounting to the comment "yes" as an answer) is to break SE's rules about very short answers.</p>

<p>Further, it's a Q&amp;A that seems less likely to benefit other readers than a question with a "real" answer.</p>

<p>I have been trying to encourage OPs to rephrase into a more answerable question, but I am not sure what a good approach to this really is: </p>

<ul>
<li><p>do we tolerate "yes" answers to these questions? I have leaned this way in the past but because of what seems to be a narrower utility of these questions I wonder if that's a good idea.</p></li>
<li><p>do we try harder to push OPs to ask questions that have longer-than-one-line answers? (This might be good if there's a concrete suggestion we can offer them. While I can sometimes suggest something, I'd love to have a more generally applicable approach to changing the question that could be offered.)</p></li>
<li><p>do we come up with a different line altogether, anything from closing them to putting up with having a large set of questions that can't be properly answered (but hopefully avoiding either of those)?</p></li>
</ul>

<p>I really don't know a good way to go with these so I don't have a preferred option of my own. Any suggestions or discussion would be welcome</p>

<p>A couple of recent examples that (at the time they were posted at least) were more-or-less of the type that concern me.</p>

<p><a href="https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/171372/changing-sigma-limits-for-proof">Changing Sigma Limits for Proof</a></p>

<p><a href="https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/171054/is-my-work-acceptable-fitting-a-normal-distribution">https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/171054/is-my-work-acceptable-fitting-a-normal-distribution</a></p>

<p>Here's an older question in somewhat of the same vein:</p>

<p><a href="https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/133249/which-distribution-do-i-get">Which distribution do I get?</a></p>

<hr>

<p>Many more questions at least have the potential to encourage such answers, but (because the answer wasn't 'yes') avoid the problem, but they, too, highlight the potential problem, since we can imagine a slightly different attempt at the question which would have the 'yes' answer, such as this:</p>

<p><a href="https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/50737/implication-of-convergence-in-rth-mean">Implication of convergence in rth mean</a></p>

<p>which asks "<em>My question is whether the following steps are sufficient or not</em>"</p>

<p>to which sort of question "yes" is certainly a potential answer.</p>

<p>I know I've also answered quite a few (maybe half a dozen, maybe more) where I was able to say "yes, but"... but on several of those it took quite a good bit of thinking to come up with a "but". I don't think that's always possible.</p>
