(Editor’s Note: The author appears to have used s/smart/intellectually advantaged/gi; the inverse would be s/stupid/intellectually disadvantaged/gi. The author is clearly a psychology major.)
As a retired teaching assistant1, I have received and answered many questions from students (or at least I have made an attempt at answering most of those questions). Many of these students have done a great job of asking questions that give me enough information to provide a quick and accurate answer. Some of these students actually put so much thought into writing their questions that they were able to find answers for themselves. On the other hand though, there are some students who do not put much effort into their work and thus their questions are somewhat difficult to answer. For instance, emails that consist entirely of the text “How come??” do not provide much context on the problem that the student has. Similarly, providing a screenshot of the code in an IDE rather than the actual source code makes it difficult to identify the source of the problem that the student is having.
The way that questions are asked certainly has an impact on the answers to the question. This holds true on Stack Overflow as well, but with some minor differences due to the nature of Stack Overflow. The good questions are very much the same, such as the most up-voted question currently on Stack Overflow:
The question has many attributes of what we may consider to be a good question. Starting from the beginning, the title clearly states what the problem is. The entire question is written in grammatically correct English. Much of the body of the question contains sample code that demonstrates the problem, and the rest is concise while providing enough information to understand what the problem is. It is also evident that the author did a considerable amount of work before posting the question: aside from the original C++ source code that includes benchmark timing, the author provided a Java equivalent to show that the problem was language-independent. The author also shows just the raw data rather than adding personal interpretation, refraining from creating a bias toward any particular solution.
As a result of these positive qualities, the question above has nine responses including a very detailed answer that includes an example of what the problem would be like in the physical world, discusses the theory behind the problem, and provides a solution. Though obviously we cannot assume that all well-written questions will receive well-written responses, it would seem likely that the respondent would not have taken the time to write such an answer had the question not merited that level of effort.
Stack Overflow now tends to do a pretty good job of deleting or editing poor questions. This makes it slightly more difficult to find examples of poorly written questions. However, one example of a question since edited from its original poor quality is:
http://stackoverflow.com/revisions/11694273/1
In contrast to the good question, there are a number of issues with the original state of this question. The title of the question is not particularly informative. Although the grammatical errors do not significantly impair the ability of readers to understand the text, those mistakes are still present. There is technically code illustrating the problem, but since it is in a jsfiddle rather than in the question itself readers have to open up another page to view the code and the code becomes unavailable if the link is broken. There is nothing to indicate that the author has done anything to solve the problem aside from writing the original code. The question is vague enough to make it impossible to think of what a solution might be.
These negative characteristics of the question led to the question receiving only one answer, from the same user who edited the question to make it slightly more understandable at http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11694273/object-object-error. This reflects the reluctance of Stack Overflow users to answer non-smart questions.
Of course, two questions on Stack Overflow are not enough to conclusively state that good questions lead to good answers and vice versa. However, it is reasonable to assume that answers will generally reflect the quality of the question asked. In some cases, an answerer might not be able to provide a good response because of a lack of information from the questioner. Consequently, it is proper to put as much effort into writing a question as one expects to receive in the answers.
Alternately, having enough money to be able to hire someone to do the work for you is also a valid solution.
1: The author returned to service as a teaching assistant the semester after writing this.