Rep-mining / Using the site as a blog

Question

I’ve noticed recently that numerous users (including high-rep users and even moderators) have been posting generic, hypothetical questions, followed immediately by an answer and accepting it.

I don’t have a problem with posting articles about solving problems (I do it myself on my blog, as do others like Russinovich), but I don’t think that this is the correct forum for this for several reasons:

• Some of the questions are not ones they actually faced but very generic questions
• If there is already such a question, then the answer should be posted there instead of making up a contrived question just for the sake of posting the answer
• There is already a Super User blog that can be used for posting truly noteworthy help/troubleshooting article, not to mention numerous other places like your own blogs
• The contrived questions are often too generic and not very useful in and of themselves
• It smacks of rep-mining, especially since even if it is a question that they actually had, they obviously already solved it, so asking the question is questionable whether it’s a generic hypothetical or very specific (too localized?)
• It opens the door to allow everybody to post question-answer pairs to any every problem they can conceive of. This means that the site could be flooded with simple, pointless questions
• One of the tenets of the site is that users are expected to have put in some effort in solving the problem they have before asking, and there reason that there exists a delay before you can accept your own answer: it is assumed that you do not know the solution and must continue trying as well as to give other users a chance to answer it, but these questions don’t conform to that expectation at all

(I’ll admit that there are times when simply typing up the question causes something to click, allowing for the solution to be found, but when that happens, why post the question at all if you no longer have the problem? Just cancel the post and if you really, really feel that the problem is common or at least noteworthy, then post it on a/the blog.)

Is this to be allowed? I think that posting questions simply for the sake of answering it does not belong here (that’s what blogs are for), and users should be required to wait some time before even answering their own question just like they do to accept it.

Answer 1

This is 100% status-bydesign. In fact, it's a core part of how Stack Exchange works.

The sort of questions you're seeing are what we call "canonical answers." It's an effort to build a knowledge base of information that's likely to be useful for many different people.

Self-answering is encouraged. If you figure out something cool that other people might benefit from, you should write up a self-answer blog-type post.

If you take a look at the Tour, you'll see this highlighted there, too.

      
                [Alternative version: ]

On Super User, we've taken this to the next level with community-faq questions. We specifically encourage users to write questions and answers to address common problems. We don't want 15 different "halp i got a virus what i do?" questions. We want a single starting point that's a good reference for what to do if you get a virus. We don't need 20 "can i do this with my win7 license?" questions. We want a single good overview of all the licensing options.

Answer 2

I’ve noticed recently that numerous users (including high-rep users and even moderators) have been posting generic, hypothetical questions, followed immediately by an answer and accepting it.

Any examples, you're leaving us guessing to which type of those questions you're actually referring. Like nhinkle outlines; we've had community-faq questions, an introduced feature which allows immediate self-answers, we try to make some community wiki as well and there's probably some other approaches to it. And then there's still the difference between those high-rep users and mods, they don't all post the same content.

So, I would love to see which content you specifically refer to, so that if we agree upon it then we can relocate and/or improve that content to benefit our community.

I don’t have a problem with posting articles about solving problems (I do it myself on my blog, as do others like Russinovich), but I don’t think that this is the correct forum for this for several reasons.

Super User is not a forum, it's a Q&A site; any such content that falls under the FAQ restrictions is welcome. I'm missing a core reason in your paragraph, can you summarize why you think so without listing an entire section of reasons? I'll do the opposite, and use usability to test your reasoning.

• Some of the questions are not ones they actually faced but very generic questions

That's not a reason, but solely an observation, it doesn't tell us what's good or bad about it. In the context of usability, it's quite handy for helping people to refer to such generic questions as to not time the same amount of text again.

Cleaning your computer of viruses is at its core a procedure that goes through the same amount of steps, most of the time; yet, people will continue to ask "I'm noticing some odd behaviour, what do?" without having actually gone through these steps.

If they go through these steps instead and still experiencie a virus problem, then we can go into a much more detailed question. We don't want over 9000 questions that all ask and answer the same thing, do we? We want questions about more detailed problems instead, to learn more people more.

• If there is already such a question, then the answer should be posted there instead of making up a contrived question just for the sake of posting the answer

Example? We have actually improved questions to be more generic. Same reasoning as above...

• There is already a Super User blog that can be used for posting truly noteworthy help/troubleshooting article, not to mention numerous other places like your own blogs.

Example? community-faq and self-answers are somewhat different from the blog, we shouldn't aim to turn the blog into a generic Q&A place. The blog is made for opinion, the Q&A site is made for facts and references...

• It smacks of rep-mining, especially since even if it is a question that they actually had, they obviously already solved it, so asking the question is questionable whether it’s a generic hypothetical or very specific (too localized?)

If we ask a question that ought to help a ton of people, then we sure deserve to gain some reputation from that; however, there's actually the community wiki option to protect us from gaining too much reputation, so if you believe an user to be rep-mining this way you can always flag the question and state that its "cheese" made to be cut by our "community wiki knife".

• It opens the door to allow everybody to post question-answer pairs to any every problem they can conceive of. This means that the site could be flooded with simple, pointless questions

And is this actually happening? Can you show us such flood that doesn't prove to be usable?

• One of the tenets of the site is that users are expected to have put in some effort in solving the problem they have before asking, and there reason that there exists a delay before you can accept your own answer: it is assumed that you do not know the solution and must continue trying as well as to give other users a chance to answer it, but these questions don’t conform to that expectation at all

Consider that we actually spent answer to make it generic, that's a progress that isn't simple as you have a lot of cases to deal with. For instance, when talking about cooling you have to deal with both fans and water cooling, when talking about the booting process you have to deal with Windows, Linux and more, and so on. It isn't as simple as merely writing a one-liner or one paragraph to Q&A something generic, but then again, you're free to proof me wrong with an example.

One of our tenets is also "Sharing your experience so others can learn.", sometimes that takes more than an answer alone. And that's where we come in to improving the wiki aspect of the site...

Is this to be allowed? I think that posting questions simply for the sake of answering it does not belong here (that’s what blogs are for), and users should be required to wait some time before even answering their own question just like they do to accept it.

You think so, but can you prove? Unless someone proves us wrong, why should we disallow this?

_{If we were to act upon our thoughts, without reasons backed up by statistics / facts, this would surely be a weird place!}