What about self-answering questions?

Question

This is a poll, so please answer clearly and/or upvote an existing answer:

• Do you have any additional arguments, whether in favour or against?
• Should we keep the current policy, of telling people we'd prefer they don't post questions in order to self-answer them?
• Should we keep the current "tacit" policy, of tolerating some self-answered questions (for example if they're upvoted), as well as of allowing or accepting a moderator's deleting such a topic if the moderator wants to?
• Should we change (or simply undo, vote against), the current site-specific policy, and instead welcome (in general) the self-answering of topics?
• Do we need to reconsider any other policy, related to "what is a 'high quality' question?", and, "Is a 'low quality' question ever closed and if so by whom?"

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Introduction

Bhante Kumāra posted (and answered) this topic and that led to this chat.

In that chat I tried to explain this policy -- May I share my research, by posting questions on this site and self-answering them?

Ven. Kumāra (and Ruslan) would like to revisit and perhaps reverse that decision.

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Reasons for disapproving of self-answered questions

Some of the reasons I gave in chat were that self-answered topics can be a vehicle for low-quality or disruptive content, for example:

• Someone can use it to an argument across multiple topics, for example:

  Question: Is such-and-such true? User X said "such-and-such", in topic Y. Are they right?

  Answer: No! User X is wrong, and such-and-such is false! etc.

• Someone can post questions which seem intended to prove that their knowledge is superior:

  • "Asks a question"
  • (Waits for other people to answer...)
  • (Posts an answer): "Thanks for trying, everyone, but here's the correct answer which I was expecting: etc."

• Someone can flood the site with several questions and answers per day.

• It can be used for posting dubious content -- conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, maybe spam-like topics.

• It seemed to me that the community had voted against it -- including in this topic which has answers like:

  Personally, I find seeded questions irksome; it's generally easy to see that the asker isn't really looking for an answer, so there is no sense of accomplishment in answering. It feels more like a chore, like editing Wikipedia or something.

  ... and,

  Simply put, the best way for a SE site to answer questions from beginners is for beginners to ask them. However, SE sites make for great Q&A sites, not for great reference sites.

  ... as well as in this topic where even MathewMartin's answer, which appears to say "yes", also says,

  Yeah, posting a rhetorical question & answering it is bad business (for this site, fine for a blog/discussion forum tho)

  So it was a clear majority of the users who voted -- 9 users to 3 or something like that -- including all three of the moderators.

• Contrary to SE norms, on this site we have little or no quality control on questions -- Moderation policies for Questions -- and if a question is closed it's closed by moderators not by users. Because "self-answered" question can be unwelcome -- low-quality and/or disruptive, we discourage them in general to avoid having arguments about why their question was OK but yours is unwelcome.

• In practice moderators aren't strict in enforcing the rule.

  If a user does it occasionally/rarely, if the question and answer are welcome (up-voted), if it doesn't seem "disruptive", then (so far as I remember) moderators don't delete it, instead it's "tolerated".

  The existence of the rule lets us (moderators) delete things if we don't like it:

  • Usually the community has asked moderators not to judge the "quality" of a post (but this rule allows us to)
  • On this site it tends to be only moderators -- not users -- who will close a question (it takes 5 high-reputation users to vote to close, or only one moderator's vote)

• In my personal experience or memory of other SE sites, self-answered questions are permitted but not very important. They're rare on any main site, and are mostly used for faq topics on Meta.

  The most useful, most-upvoted topics on Stack Overflow seem to be all people answering other people's questions, not their own.

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Reasons for approving of self-answered questions

Ven. Kumāra's argument for permitting them includes:

• They're usually allowed on other SE sites -- Can I answer my own question?

  Yes! Stack Exchange has always explicitly encouraged users to answer their own questions.

Furthermore (quoting from chat):

• And I'm also saying trust SE's design to make Buddhism.SE work, because it has proven to work elsewhere. There's no reason it wouldn't work here. And there's no proof that it's not working.

• I'm believe when people use is like their onw blog, they question will get much downvoted and the person will eventually leave. This is not just a theory. We already have proof of this.

  (Therefore allowing self-answers isn't harmful -- instead simply downvoting is enough to solve the problem and/or make people leave.)

• Besides, if we want to attract more experts, then openly allow self-answering, because that's an important factor in attracting them. By disallowing it as a policy, or even just to discourage it almost as a rule, the moderators have undermined a major reason why SE is successful elsewhere.

  Experts who want to share find this an attractive place. We should encourage the useful ones, and shoo away the useless one, instead of shooing away all of them.

I suspect that users in favour of this change, and/or who may want to post self-answered questions, include Ven. Kumāra (who's proposing this change), Ruslan, perhaps other (current or former) users including Theravada and Lowbrow, and perhaps Samana Johann.

Answer 1

Generally, what I like to do is to post a question sincerely i.e. where I do not know the answer to the question.

Then I choose the best answer to the question, and this must come from others.

However, I may later post an answer based on useful information that I discovered AFTER posting the question, in which case, I will never accept my own answer.

The reason for this is that I think this is very useful information that should not go unposted, and would add value to the question.

My example for this is Was the Abhidhamma taught by the Buddha?.

Answer 2

I'm strongly opposed to giving green light to quasi-questions posted with the sole intent to share an opinion, an unsolicited teaching, rambling, philosophical musings etc.

If someone can enumerate and define scenarios when self-answering is not utilized in order to take advantage of Buddhism SE platform to push unsolicited info at the audience, and develop some sort of guidelines for telling them apart, we may be able to find a better compromise than today's black-n-white policy.

I believe when people use it like their own blog, their question will get downvoted and the person will eventually leave.

Regarding the above, my experience from being on this site since 2014 is exactly the opposite. Instead of getting downvoted out of sight, low-quality content -- including the preaching/rambling-style questions and answers -- attract other similar low-quality questions, answers, and comments, which creates a self-supporting cyclical tendency that eventually crowds out good quality content, discouraging serious users and pushing them to leave.

Answer 3

• "Asks a question"
• (Waits for other people to answer...)
• (Posts an answer): "Thanks for trying, everyone, but here's the correct answer which I was expecting: etc."

I think this kind of answer should be edited so that it neither extolls some nor disparages others by asserting one's correctness.

I know some people post answers like this to regular questions and i am pretty sure i've flagged some as abusive. I've been annoyed and posted answers like "how on earth can people think that..." i think even that is unnecessary and id be rightly censored.

Answer 4

I think there is 3 situation:

1. One does not know the answer and later after finding something useful hence adds a late answer which is acceptable.
2. One has an answer in mind. Unless one is a pure novice one will have some answer, in many cases it is the level of confidence and depths in the knowledge is what changes. In this case, the answer should be posted with the question so others do not was time digging up the same information or trying to answer at the same depth. Also, others can share answers where their angle differs from the given answer. This can also be verifying if one's position is right or if one has missed any angle. Not being able to share what one has got would mean one gets answers on what one already knows or may not be at the depth one is seeking and wasting everyone's time. E.g. one has a Sutrantha answer but not the full Abhidhamma angle not sharing this means someone may also give a Sutrantha answer wasting his and your time. Providing and answer reduces the burden on others to the amount of facts they have to research to complete or different angle to the question.
3. Questions to test others might not resonate well with uses and these are the ones which need to be discouraged.

Answer 5

What about self-answering questions?

I vote to keep the policy as it is now.

Removing it would allow anyone (teachers, self-appointed experts, preachers etc.) to post their own answers. It could become messy and lead to arguments and discussions on the site which we have tried before. It takes a huge toll on moderator resources.

IMO it's better to keep the policy as it is now and do as @Ruben has mentioned in his answer.