'We encourage members to use online resources when answering questions.' Why not the same encouragement BEFORE asking stupid questions?

How would you go about doing that? Tell every potential questioner to figure it out for themselves? You'd have to be psychic to get the message across to newcomers. Besides, if YA did that, then their traffic would probably go down some.

Actually, there's a real-life basis for this problem of not being able to Google stuff properly. Studies have shown that younger people (who were raised on 2000s technology) don't know how to utilize the internet to find information: http://gawker.com/5601015/study-young-people-dont-...

The study in question: http://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/636

Honestly, I think it's just plain laziness. A lot of folks just expect others to do all the hard work.

That's true. There ARE no stupid questions, only stupid people asking questions!

The original purpose (an still the purpose) of YA is to build a database of Q&As, of all sorts. So Yahoo really does not want everyone to "google it" first. It also really goes without saying that people should do a search first.

There's no such thing as a stupid question. 😉