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I wonder if it's in the spirit of the site, or if my questions will get down-voted to oblivion, were I to answer my own question as I post it. My intent is to build some sort of public KB; stuff which I could reference in the future, share with co-workers and the world. But I read on another meta post about not asking and answering your own questions, if they're trivial.

An example of the type of Q&A that I'm referring to would this post from earlier. In that example, I came across the problem of DNF wanting to remove a kernel I wanted to keep. I quickly got the answer by asking in IRC, and thought to put it in Stack Exchange, both for my own reference, and in case someone else came across it.

Also, does this type of Q&A help to increase your reputation?

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    it took me a minute to realize that "KB" meant "Knowledge Base". Apr 19, 2019 at 18:43

1 Answer 1

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Absolutely! Posting self-answered questions is encouraged and there is even a built-in provision to simplify doing it. Just don't fill up the site with trivial stuff. And if you start posting tons of threads that are useful only to you, people may get annoyed (it's happened). But if you have had a serious question, yourself, and found the solution, and it may benefit others, by all means, post it. Do a quick site search, though, to make sure the question hasn't already been asked. If it has, and someone else hasn't already posted the solution you found, post your answer on that question.

For a self-answered question, post the question as you would if you didn't already know the answer. There's nothing wrong, though, with ending it with an alert that it's a self-answered question just for context when people come across it.

In the Ask Question window, you'll see a checkbox near the bottom to indicate that you will be answering your own question. Clicking that opens an Answer edit window, as well. You can then work on both the question and answer, then post them both at the same time. That avoids helpful people jumping in with an answer for you before they see that it has already been solved.

Don't be surprised if you get additional answers. You may even learn an alternate solution. If you think your own solution is the best, you can accept your own answer two days after the question was posted.

In terms of rep, you obviously can't vote for your own posts, and you don't get rep for accepting your own answer. But a self-answered question provides two posts that other people can vote on. Just make them high-quality, useful posts.

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    Thank you for the detailed response. You mentioned " Just don't fill up the site with trivial stuff." What is considered trivial? Would the post that I referenced be considered trivial? I'm just trying to figure out approximately where the line is drawn.
    – Jeff
    Apr 10, 2019 at 5:03
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    @Jeff, that's one of those things where you know it when you see it. It would include very basic, common knowledge that would be the first thing people would learn doing even a cursory search for an answer. Think in terms of what kinds of questions & answers get upvoted vs. downvoted by the community. Well-crafted, useful posts get upvoted. Unclear posts of no benefit to anyone but the author get downvoted. But if you encountered a real-life problem that was important to you, and it took more digging to solve it than the first item that popped up on Google, that's probably a good candidate.
    – fixer1234
    Apr 10, 2019 at 5:19
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    Just an FYI, your friends vote on your contributions because you submitted them, will get you quickly banned for vote fraud. So don’t ask them to vote on your contributions, if and when, you share them. Users have made this mistake in the past
    – Ramhound
    Apr 10, 2019 at 22:00
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    I only looked here to see if this question was answered by the person who asked it.
    – Nate
    Apr 12, 2019 at 22:23
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    Yes it's totally useful. It's like writing a blog post of your problems with answers, and who knows, sometimes I find myself even helping myself with (either blogging or logging stuff to SE)
    – rogerdpack
    Apr 15, 2019 at 20:07
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    In the few cases I did this, I started my answer with (Answering my own question).
    – Jan Doggen
    Apr 16, 2019 at 20:00

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