Good Subjective, Bad Subjective underpins the current network approach to subjective questions. It lays down the principles found at the bottom of What types of questions should I avoid asking? which help us distinguish what kinds of subjective questions we do and don't accept.
Something it also does is lay down our expectations for Good Subjective answers, which are expected to be based on actual experience. Here's what it says on that topic, all original formatting included:
The folks at Moms4mom owned up to the subjective issue and came up with a set of principles to create useful subjective discussions on parenting: the Back It Up! Principle. Back It Up! means that your answers must be based on either:
- Something that happened to you personally
- Something you can back up with a reference
They talk about how “opinion, by itself, is noise.” They’re not saying that subjective opinions are to be avoided; they’re attempting to mold and shape their inherently subjective Q&A; into something constructive, informative and helpful.
This is great guidance, but there's also a problem here: This is the sum total of guidance on the entire network's official documentation that I've ever found that explains what's needed for creating a Good Subjective answer, and it's just two paragraphs and two bullet points buried in the very middle of a very large blog post that's otherwise entirely about questions.
Note also the link: the page it points to doesn't contain or mention Back It Up! anywhere anymore. Moms4moms has a “back it up” link in their footer but the link is a 404.
This means resources directly explaining what we need for Good Subjective answers are sort of missing or inadequate. “Good Subjective” doesn't even get mentioned in the help center except for a link to this blog post in a related reading list; searching for “subjective” fares no better. How do I write a good answer? doesn't mention any of this stuff.
Good Subjective citation for answers is a pretty important thing though. The sites that interact with these principles a lot (like Role-Playing Games or Interpersonal Skills or Software Engineering) have to explain it often. Because the above quote is actually fairly light on details we have to flesh out more detailed explanations ourselves on meta, re-inventing the wheel each time so to speak. In fact until we wrote one earlier this month (January 2018) RPG simply did not have any one single explanation of Good Subjective, just many different more specific ones. But there are many more Subjective sites than ours, and those sites could do with a single Help location that actually dedicates itself to explaining Good Subjective expectations for answers.
Could a help center page please be added that focuses on explaining Good Subjective and the Back It Up! principle in the context of answers?
P.S.: Something I've run into is that people can have trouble understanding what passages in their answers are subjective. Sometimes they think “this is the best course of action for your situation” is just fact. Such a help center post should help people identify what subjective means such that they can better recognise when a post needs subjective citation.
