<p>Recently on CrossValidated I have found that new members may not have studied all the rules prior to asking their first question.  I find that moderators and other users will quickly vote to close either because they think it is a duplicate or statement of the question is not clear or the question is off topic.  Such decisions are a matter of judgment.  I have seen cases where these new members become very frustrated.  I understand why the rules must be followed.  However I think in such cases a comment to the new member suggesting what is wrong with the question should be done first. They should wait a reasonable amount of time for a an edit to the question or a comment from the new member before taking action.</p>

<p>On two occasions I did things that I thought were reasonable but got moderators upset with me.
Situation 1: A new user asked his first question that I told him was not complete and looked like a self study question.  He commented that he couldn't edit the question because he thought he was limited in the question length.  So I agreed to edit it.  The question was put on hold.  I don't remember whether it was before or after I made the comment.  So I edited the question adding the information he gave me in comments.  I also added the self help tag.  I then found a second question with similar problems so I edited that one too. Two moderators criticized me for this for different reasons. On the second question I was told that I should have given the OP the chance to edit the question himself (not knowing the discussion that went on with the first question). The other moderator didn't think I should have edited a question that was already put on hold.</p>

<p>Situation 2: A new user asked a simple question.  I had a satisfactory answer but I also knew that there were many situations (possible for different modeling methods) where this problem came up. The user was worried that she did something wrong.  I thought that it would be best for me to give the answer and point the OP to a search method that using the key words "negative R square" would yield many hits. I thought it would be a difficult task to see if I could consider any of them an exact duplicate.  I thought that the OP should look through a few of them to see how commonly the question comes up with a variety of models. The OP and others liked my question and I got 2 up votes for it.  A moderator suggested that I should not have answered the question but rather should have searched for a duplicate and recommend it for close/hold.  He assumed that there would be an exact duplicate and that I was cluttering the site with repeat questions and an answer that was short (not canonical) and not as informative as a longer supposed duplicate.</p>

<p>Am I wrong in either situation and if you think so could you explain why?</p>
