I recently noticed that there's a tooltip for the question upvoting button that begins with "This question shows research effort..."
That got me thinking - if I have a question that I can probably find an answer to somewhere on the web, should I make an effort to find the answer on my own, and not bother posting it on the site?
This may seem sensible, as I'm not creating "duplicate data" on the internet (I have to admit this sounds a little silly, but still), but on the downside I am not expanding the amount of knowledge contained in the site. Also, my question could end up being more eloquent than the one I eventually tracked to get my answer on some other site, making it easier for people to find an answer in the future.
So which is it? If research is enough of a virtue to warrant appearing in the tooltip, then this should probably go in the faq as well (unless it's already there and I've missed it). If it's not, however, then all this tooltip does is make people think twice about posting their question, and not necessarily about the quality of their question.
Of course there's another option, and that is that "research" in the tooltip's context means something else entirely.