Taking the initiative to ask questions is only one step to the process of seeking help. The next part is asking the right question so you can get the right answer. Like anything else, there is an “art” to asking questions. Now, that is not to say that there is such thing as a “dumb” question, however there is definitely a more productive approach to asking questions. A major way of asking the right question is to give enough but concise context.
Next up, you should make sure that your question can be resolved on your own or that your question has already been resolved somewhere on the internet. I know this sounds counterintuitive since you clearly have a question and would not have asked it in the first place if there was not a problem to begin with. However, like I said previously, this is where being productive with your questions comes into play. You can be productive with your questions by first making sure that you have done everything you could possibly do to resolve your questions on your own accord.
When thinking of asking a question, you should first make sure you have tried your best at thinking up ideas to solve the problem. Maybe you forgot to type a “c” for one of your variable names, maybe you accidentally deleted something, maybe you need to look through that one tutorial again, I think you get the point. For me, I usually ask a question only after I have exhausted all options and resources for solving the problem on my own and have the desire to lightly slam my computer. Once that is all done, when you think you can no longer resolve your issue on your own, then that would be a good indicator to make the decision to ask a question.
Now back to the point of giving enough but concise context to your question, you need to give the reader enough information for him or her to be able to get an understanding of your problem. This does not mean to make your questions one paragraph long, but instead to give major summary points of your problem and how you arrived at your problem. Once you have made the decision to ask the question, you must now make sure to formulate a question that shows you have tried the problem yourself and gives the person a direction of how to help you.
Take this Stack Overflow question as an example: a user asked “How do I delete a Git branch locally and remotely?” and was then given an in-depth answer explaining the command and command options for deleting a Git branch locally and remotely. This is a “smart” question because the person clearly knows about Git but does not know that deleting a branch locally is different from doing so remotely, and he has even shown that he tried to delete a branch locally and remotely on his own. Not only that, he asked a question that would be of use to others, especially those who are new to Git and the command line. The “not smart” way of asking this question would be something like “How do I delete a Git branch?” and only giving the context that you want to delete a branch without showing that you have tried it yourself first. Or another “not smart” way of asking a question similar to the one linked is by asking “How do I use Git?,” which clearly shows that you did not try to explore Git yourself first.
Furthermore, here is an example of a “not so smart” question that is also asked on Stack Overflow: a user asked <a href=””> Action to database
Is there a way to update a database using 1 click?
echo "<a href='".$wpdb->query(" UPDATE partners SET active='no' WHERE partner_id='$active_partner->partner_id' ")."'>Disable</a>";
Compared to the previous example, this is not a “smart” question because the user did not ask a question in the title of his post, instead he or she put a statement as the title of the post which has a higher chance of someone not clicking on the post. You will see that the user did in fact ask a question in the description of the post, however, once again the question shows that the user did not do his or her research about HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) and PHP (a server side language) as you cannot mix the technologies in the context of this question. Also by asking about updating the database with one click is something the user could have searched on Google himself by simply searching how to listen for a click for whichever technology the person is using. The person who answered this question gave an answer that once again is something anyone could look up on Google or YouTube.
To put this all together, there is no such thing as a “dumb” question since clearly there is a reason you have a question in the first place. However, the point of this is to demonstrate that asking “smart” questions will save you and the other people’s time. The overall return of asking “smart” questions will lead to more efficient productivity for yourself as you will get what you need, which is an answer that goes straight to your problem without the need to ask subsequent questions.