Stance on Questions that Originated from Brain-Dump Sites

Question

A question regarding summarization was asked today, and after a quick google search, I found that the question was taken from several brain dump sites, including testking and How2Pass.

I personally would take the position that all questions having anything to do with brain-dumps, directly or indirectly, should be banned, as it will bring the search results for the site into the same community as the dump sites - however, the argument could be made that as long as the person asking shows a reasonable amount of effort in understanding the logic behind the question and the concepts it covers, it might be okay.

I want to be clear - if someone posts questions asking for brain dumps, obviously those questions should be closed. I'm speaking more specifically about subtle things like the question I linked to - I didn't know it was a brain dump question until I acted on a hunch and googled it.

What is the NE-SE community stance on questions like that? Permissible, or definitely not?

Answer 1

To me anything brain dump related would fall under certification/education related questions which are off topic or considered out of the scope for this site.

Answer 2

I don't think that just being from brain-dump is enough reason for question to be considered off topic. If the question is not a copy/paste from brain dump (like subnetting example) and the asker provided his thoughts about the problem and steps how he tried to solve it, i think it should be allowed.

If the question is obviously from a brain dump and asker just wants the answer so he showed no effort in trying to solve it himself, i would consider it off topic.

If we consider all questions based on brain dumps off topic we can have a situation where we allow questions that are lower quality (but are real world examples) and close those that can be much more useful just because they are based on a question from a brain dump. Also for some more complex questions we could miss very useful answers that would benefit us all. So, it all depends. I guess there will be 2/3 of questions that should be considered off topic but for those 1/3 left we shouldn't be so rigid and ban them all.