Timeline for How do we encourage edits to obsolete/out of date answers?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
34 events
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Aug 12, 2015 at 16:53 | comment | added | Bruno | @Pacerier Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying. Edits should only be minor (e.g. typo, formatting, link update) or, if it's an important note about the answer (e.g. security risk, answer not valid for newer versions, ...), the editor should make it clear for the casual visitor that this note doesn't come from the main author. For substantial changes: write your own answer. This helps keep a clean track of authorship, and it also helps reset the score of the new answer (e.g. what if the edit was completely wrong, but the answer already had plenty of upvotes?). | |
Aug 12, 2015 at 16:48 | comment | added | Pacerier | @Bruno, I acknowledge this is not Wikipedia. So you are saying the edit done on stackoverflow.com/a/7325879/632951 should be posted as an answer and not an edit? | |
Aug 12, 2015 at 16:43 | comment | added | Bruno | @Pacerier Your example is only a repeated answer because the other author later copied the same part of the doc as you had in yours, to make it very similar indeed. That, you can't really avoid (although it's indeed not a great thing to do, unless the resulting answer is sufficiently different). Visitors will certainly quite happily survive reading those two similar answers in that example. The authorship issue is much more fundamental: you have your author name against what you write, that's what visitors will remember when quoting you. The format here is very different from Wikipedia's. | |
Aug 12, 2015 at 16:40 | comment | added | Pacerier | @Bruno, While having multiple identical answers isn't a "catastrophe", it is still an imperfect situation that could be improved upon. And it's not about whether it's "cheating" or not, that's quite beside the point. My point is that the visitor to the page would have to wade through repeated answers on the page instead of reading just the unique ones. The problem is not multiple answers, but multiple repeated answers. | |
Aug 12, 2015 at 10:43 | comment | added | Bruno | @Pacerier I'd rather see each text attributed to its rightful author (and, no, expecting readers to go through the revision history to determine authorship isn't realistic). You can't anticipate whether the other author will edit or not. Your example is a different problem: it looks like the other answerer took substantial inspiration on yours to improve his own answer (although to be fair his link seemed to point to "MaxExactCount", so I'm not sure that's "cheating"). Having two similar answers now isn't a catastrophe. | |
Aug 11, 2015 at 21:36 | comment | added | Pacerier |
@Bruno, I was about to add my own answer, but look at it this way: after I've added the answer, Edorian is going to re-update his answer again, which will then basically repeat what my posted answer says. And then, we will have two answers repeating the same thing. I'm sure you've seen many such cases happening before. There's an exact example at "COUNT(*) on InnoDB whenever phpMyAdmin loads". As a visitor to the page, would you rather see one coherent answer or would you rather see two answers both repeating the same thing?
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Aug 6, 2015 at 11:58 | comment | added | Bruno | @Pacerier However obsolete that answer was, your edit is one that completely changes the intent of the answer. This shouldn't be done like this. Leave an editor's note or something in such cases, and maybe add your own answer, but don't edit like that. | |
Aug 5, 2015 at 10:00 | comment | added | Pacerier | @Rachel, The definition of obsolete lies with visitors' expectation. The pending question would be "How useful is this answer to visitors with this particular question?" Not all cases would be clear-cut of course (this is actually the same for whether questions are on-topic/off-topic for the site) and there'll be a dose of subjectivity to it; that's the point of votes. On the other hand, there'll be posts that are blatantly obsolete, like the example I linked above: stackoverflow.com/a/7325879/632951 | |
Aug 4, 2015 at 13:49 | comment | added | Deer Hunter | @Rachel - agreed, we are treading on dangerously subjective ground. | |
Aug 4, 2015 at 13:40 | comment | added | Rachel | I think some examples of what would be considered "Obsolete" are very important. I am unclear how broad or narrow the scope would be, and feel if this route is chosen this has to be defined better. Would every single .Net tag except the most recent version be considered obsolete? Would a question and answer that targets .Net 3.5 be considered obsolete just because .Net 5.0 does it differently now? Or would the scope be extremely narrow and only count posts that actually no longer work or are no longer a problem anymore due to technology changes? | |
Aug 4, 2015 at 13:28 | history | edited | Deer Hunter | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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Aug 4, 2015 at 12:47 | comment | added | Taryn Staff | @DeerHunter I get a feeling that after AMAgeddon at Reddit StackExchange team members have been given orders to engage the community by posting discussion seeking questions every other day. Wow, really? This was posted because internally we feel it's a problem that is happening on the site and before proposing any type of fix to the network at large, we want feedback on it. That's the way the network has always worked. | |
Aug 4, 2015 at 11:35 | comment | added | Deer Hunter |
@Pacerier - content has to be curated by somebody. If the number of curators stays the same (or even declines, like for many top tags in SO), and content explodes, or just grows linearly, no technical gimmicks are going to help. Here are the stats for the php tag.
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Aug 4, 2015 at 11:28 | comment | added | Pacerier | Web technologies suffer the most from this problem. With browsers updating themselves every fortnight, HTML/CSS tips from merely 3 years ago would be about as old as the hills. | |
Aug 4, 2015 at 11:25 | comment | added | Pacerier | @DeerHunter, Regarding "bring out the stats", Sure, they could spend the manpower on bringing out the stats. Yet that would seem like a waste of resources because most people here who had visited more than 10k threads would have experienced this phenomenon and could testify to it. Speaking of the devil, just a few hours ago I came across this: stackoverflow.com/a/7325879/632951 | |
Aug 4, 2015 at 6:00 | comment | added | Claus Jørgensen | @DeerHunter Because Swift 2.0 is a replacement for the Swift language in it's entirety. The separate tag is a problem on it's own, as Swift 1.2 is dead, and will never be used in production moving after Xcode 7 (for both iOS8 and 9) | |
Aug 4, 2015 at 5:58 | comment | added | Deer Hunter |
@ClausJørgensen - only 5-9 folks are active in the swift2 tag.
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Aug 4, 2015 at 5:40 | comment | added | Claus Jørgensen | Almost the entire Swift language section on SO falls under the "obsolete" part now. A good 90%+ of the answers are directly wrong in Swift 2.0, which is a big problem. | |
Aug 4, 2015 at 1:47 | comment | added | vonbrand | To deem an asnwer "obsolete" or "requires revisit" is a human criterion, that can't really be automated. And unless real people go in and add a new answer (or update/comment on the ones extant), nothing will happen. Maybe flagging as "please consider adding a new answer" and bubbling up into "new" question status would help. Allow sorting answers by accepted/not, votes, or from newest to oldest could be useful for archeologists... | |
Aug 3, 2015 at 21:11 | comment | added | Aleksandr Dubinsky | I agree. Most old questions that need new answers don't have "obsolete" answers. They have bad answers. I try to write one when I'm able, but the issue is that it's generally a rewardless experience. SO users only vote on new questions. | |
Aug 3, 2015 at 8:57 | comment | added | Dan Dascalescu | I don't expect anything of them; it's a volunteer effort. I hope that SE implements more effective ways to bring updated answers to attention, and more importantly, changes the status quo that prevents updates to begin with (see Michael's answer). | |
Aug 3, 2015 at 8:42 | comment | added | Deer Hunter |
@DanDascalescu - thanks for the -, there are only 15 active experts in the meteor tag, what do you expect from them?
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Aug 3, 2015 at 8:27 | comment | added | Dan Dascalescu | Rapidly-evolving technologies generate large numbers of obsolete answers. meteor is a good example if one is familiar with Meteor.js. | |
Aug 3, 2015 at 6:34 | review | Suggested edits | |||
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Aug 3, 2015 at 6:19 | history | edited | Deer Hunter | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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S Aug 3, 2015 at 6:10 | history | suggested | Graham Perrin | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
SEDE was new to me; http://chat.meta.stackexchange.com/search?q=SEDE&room=89 explained
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Aug 3, 2015 at 4:58 | review | Suggested edits | |||
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Aug 2, 2015 at 21:38 | history | edited | Deer Hunter | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
Link added.
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S Aug 2, 2015 at 4:48 | history | edited | Awesome Poodles | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
legit parts of rejected edit
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Aug 2, 2015 at 3:38 | comment | added | Graham Perrin | please, can you link to where those things were previously written by you? Also I suggested an edition to this answer – primarily with attention to the word blind – "hopefully not losing the essence …". | |
Aug 2, 2015 at 3:35 | review | Suggested edits | |||
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Aug 1, 2015 at 8:34 | comment | added | Deer Hunter | After all, we require posters on main sites to show an MWE and proof of own research. The same standard should apply to MSE. | |
Aug 1, 2015 at 6:56 | history | edited | Deer Hunter | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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Aug 1, 2015 at 6:24 | history | answered | Deer Hunter | CC BY-SA 3.0 |