I'm all for making a UI as simple and helpful as is practical. But at some point we reach diminishing returns: we invest so much in being helpful that it exceeds the cost of users misunderstanding. With Jeff's suggestion at the end, it may even be that pre-supplied question text causes enough badly-presented questions, or questions with the boilerplate itself left intact, that it makes the situation worse.

So I think it's worth playing devil's advocate: is there some point at which we're justified in expecting the user to just grow up and read, or give a little bit of thought to what you're doing? Why do we, in the software industry, beat ourselves up so much, when the rest of the world is given a free pass?

I mean, whether it's figuring out how to use some kind of glue, or operating the PBX system, or planting a garden, and on and on, we expect that the user is going to read something about what the heck he's doing. Why not with computers?