First, let me say that Stack Overflow and its related wikis are
one of my favorite places on the net, and I've learned
tremendously from many of you, and find most of you to be fine
and charming folks — and most importantly genuinely helpful.
That said I've noticed a few disturbing trends on the site, and
I wanted to discuss one of them here.  I've seen a few past
posts on this meta like this one discussing how to dissuade
users from using SO as a digital "cheat sheet" to do their
homework assignments. I get that, and consider that discussion
perfectly valid.  Note on title (Perhaps the title should be
"should we?" if we can not prevent this, but I'm keeping the
"can", as I think we "should" and "can".)  Let me start with an
example. How do I Select Highest Number From Series of
<string>_# File Names in Bash Script  User msw posts a comment
"Please discuss the speed..." sounds like homework."  This was
NOT homework. It was a post regarding research I was doing. I
have no idea how they would even think that a