When to accept an answer for someone

Asked by Daniel Shub on 28 Jun 2012

Latest activity Answered by Jan on 7 Mar 2017

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TMW has now given many of us the power to accept answers for other people, but haven't provided any guidance as to when we should we do it (other than that we have to wait for 7 days). As uncle Ben said "with great power comes great responsibility." Should we be accepting our own answers? Maybe we should add a vote to accept "policy"?

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Answer by Thomas on 28 Jun 2012

Edited by Thomas on 28 Jun 2012

How about

Do not accept your own answer

unless

1. The author has thanked you replied that the problem has been solved but the author has not accepted your answer 'and' you have multiple up votes 'and'

2. yours is the only answer received

In case of multiple answers received please let one of the other (hopefully unbiased) editors accept the answer, probably based on the number of 'up votes'

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Jan on 28 Jun 2012

Accepting answers for other authors would be less critical, if the the un-accepting is possible.

Additional limitation: Give the author one week to accept an answer.

Daniel Shub on 28 Jun 2012

@Jan there is a 7 day wait period.

Matt J on 24 Feb 2017

3. You are answering your own question ?

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Answer by Daniel Shub on 28 Jun 2012

Edited by Daniel Shub on 28 Jun 2012

I disagree with Thomas. I think we should never accept our own answers. I also think we should be vigilant about accepting answers for other people. If we accept answers for each other, then their will not be too many cases where you feel like you need to accept your own answer.

Edit

I think that you should flag questions/answers that you think should be accepted and then get a confirmation from someone else.

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James Tursa on 24 Feb 2017

I agree with Daniel et al. The system should not allow one to either vote for or accept one's own answer. To allow this practice is to invite abuse. Yes, there are cases where the answer is clearly correct and complete but the answer was not accepted and did not generate acceptance points for the contributor. Sometimes you spend a lot of time crafting a detailed response, only to get a simple "thanks!" and nothing else (and sometimes not even that). Fine. I would rather have that situation than the situation where an abuser is pumping up his/her own reputation points by voting for and/or accepting his/her own answers. It is a disservice to the community to allow this practice.

Walter Roberson on 24 Feb 2017

If I recall correctly, you do not get reputation points for accepting your own answer. However, your stats in the Contributors page do go up.

James Tursa on 24 Feb 2017

IMO, you should not be able to pump up anything related to your own points or stats by voting for or accepting your own answers. Even if you don't get the points, there is still an incentive for abuse by skewing the answers accepted stats.

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Answer by Walter Roberson on 28 Jun 2012

Out of all of the changes, this is the one that gives me the greatest pause. My first reaction is that such a facility should seldom be used, and that it should be one of the high-reputation privs rather than just about the first non-trivial priv.

I tend to think of it as being very much a "janitor" function, for use by the few that go around spending time just cleaning up. I do that, but I don't think many others do.

I think the problem being addressed is that approximately 60% of all Questions get Answered by never get Accepted. That is a quite large number, and honestly there is no way I have time by myself to Accept all those, so perhaps it does need to be something that a fair number of people can do. But still I am concerned.

I see a lot of Questions that dry out rather than getting definitively solved. People posting (good) requests for clarification and not getting any response. Now there are certainly cases where an Answer is good enough for the expressed Question, but in my experience a large number of Questions are muddled, and that even when Questions seem to be well expressed that there is very often some ambiguity in the details (though it might take someone familiar with that field to spot it.) The questions that have enough information to answer completely are usually ones that can be answered by reference to a specific FAQ section.

I suspect 500 reputation is too low to establish a history of dealing well with the kind of ambiguity that is present in those many questions.

A few days ago I was musing about this situation a bit, and I was thinking that perhaps the most appropriate would be an "expired" or "inactive" status. I would have to think more about what properties such a status would have. Not usually auto-delete, as sometimes some good discussion gets generated before the matter gets put aside.

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Wendy Fullam on 9 Apr 2013

I'm part of the internal team for Answers at MathWorks. I'd encourage the acceptance of each others' answers, after 7 days, to add value to the question and answer set for future visitors.

A primary benefit of the "Accept" feature is to provide an indication of value to future site visitors who have the same (or similar) question. Answers receives upwards of 14,000 visitors every day. When these visitors find a question without an "accepted" answer, their perception may be that no value can be extracted. This may lead to them asking a similar, possibly duplicate question - which might waste the time of major contributors. For this reason, accepting each others' Answers could, in effect, save you time. It also adds a large indication of quality to our Answer database.

We are exploring other methods to encourage the OP to accept an Answer. (Expanded notifications may potentially help here.) Conversely, contributors with high reputation have proven their ability to provide quality content - which is why we also believe they can recognize quality content, in the absence of the participation of the OP.

This is why I say, go ahead! Accept each others' answers if you think they were the best Answer provided. The 7 day delay was established because, at that point, the chance of the OP returning is fairly low. You'll be adding additional value to the Answers world, and helping to grow each others' reputation score.

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Answer by Jan on 25 Feb 2017

I suggest to disable self-accepting completely.

One exception: In own questions, accepting own answers is useful, when the OP has found a solution or if the question is thought as a tutorial or FAQ.

It is enough, when the contributors with > 2000 or > 3000 points can accept the answers of others. This will might be a drawback in rare situations, but it can get a severe problem, if one or more users start a massive self-accepting. Seeing the green check mark on an answer has a great attraction. The more time and energy has been spent to write an answer, the more frustrating is the impression to be ignored. In general all answers are given with the opinion, that they are good enough for beeing accepted. But authors of answers are not necessarily unbiased enough to decide this. Currently 94 members have the power to use this feature and in the past they have done this with greate care. But this need not be case in the future, and this would destroy the accepted status as strong indicator for an answer, which is good and solve the asked question.

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Walter Roberson on 25 Feb 2017

"In general all answers are given with the opinion, that they are good enough for being accepted."

Only generally. ;-)

I sometimes write Answers that further explore topics, adding to the knowledge but not attempting to be the solution to the particular problem at hand.

I also sometimes write Answers along the lines of "That was not a good question", without giving a solution to the issue.

I may have something useful to say that is too long or significant to be just a "comment", but I do not expect to be Accepted in either situation.

Jan on 25 Feb 2017

@Walter: :-) Touché. The "in general" sentence was a weak workaround, after I did not find a matching translation in 5 minutes. This term was the knot in my tongue. I think, there are severe problems in the forum currently, but I do not want to pillory somebody, who does not participate in the discussion. Babbling, I know.

Sometimes I add answers also, when there is an accepted answer already and my solution is slower. Then readers do not have to test this by their own again.

James Tursa on 2 Mar 2017

@Jan: I agree.

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Answer by Kye Taylor on 28 Jun 2012

Such functionality should not have been implemented, IMO.

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Answer by Matt J on 24 Feb 2017

Edited by Matt J on 24 Feb 2017

Maybe we should add a vote to accept "policy"?

This is the solution that I would advocate. Let the answer be accepted if/when it receives a sufficient number of upvotes (which as usual cannot be given by the person supplying the answer).

Personally, I think that the answer acceptance system as a whole is expandable, and that the ranking of any answer in a thread should be determined entirely by upvotes. The value of an answer marked as accepted is an illusion. Nobody ever knows definitively if an answer is right except maybe for the simplest of "how to" questions. It's not uncommon for an OP to select a less than best answer.

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Walter Roberson on 24 Feb 2017

"My larger point is, there is no reason an answer should be given a high value - and the thread considered closed - purely because it gave the OP a sense of satisfaction."

I do not agree.

People come here, and they ask questions, and they get responses. At some point, the person who asked the question either wanders off leaving it unresolved, or the person says "Yup, that's good enough for me, I'm done here, I'm not looking for anything more on this." The person who asked the question is the one who knows if they are expecting / hoping for more; when they are not, then they should have the facility to mark "So long, and thanks for all the fish".

The people who ask questions are typically doing so transactionally: they have something specific to solve, and once it is solved they move on.

This does not mean that there are no better solutions than the ones already given, or no better explanations, or no good questions about matters that should have been taken into account. It might mean that the person who asked the Question has Stopped Listening, though certainly not always.

Now, from the perspective of a resource to search for good solutions and best practices, the matter does not necessarily end there. People continue to drop in and vote or contribute, people continue to discuss, and as better alternatives come along (possibly involving features or tools that were not present at the original time), people continue to update. Curation takes place. And it is from that perspective that it starts to matter that a less good solution is marked prominently as "the" solution.

When we start to think in terms of curation of good solutions to problems, then we need to ask whether the existing tools and structure are suitable for that purpose. I do not think they really are.

For example, having more than 170 different Questions about DCT lsb steganography is frustrating and confusing. From the curation point of view, it would be better if a lot of those were lumped together, with probably a lot of redundancy thrown out. Wavelet lsb steganography might perhaps be different enough from DCT lsb steganography that the two should not be entirely merged.

When it comes to curation time, it would not be uncommon for most parts to be discarded (or at least relegated to end-notes.) 82 different versions of programs in which the user used "sum" as a variable and then tried to call "sum" as a function are only "useful" from the perspective of convincing people that Yes, this is something to take seriously.

At the moment, there is no deliberate project of having anyone experienced in a topic put together a "Topics In / Best Practices For / Common Problems For / FAQ" kind of post that might be the one that people should be more referred to. The MATLAB FAQ that does exist lives outside the Answers system.

How we should best curate is a good question, but it is not the same question as how to deal with the many many transactional posts -- the answers to which provide source material that could be drawn upon.

Perhaps an "I'm done here!" status should be more clearly separated from the "This is the solution" status.

Walter Roberson on 25 Feb 2017

I wonder though, whether it would make sense for a vote from the original poster to be worth more within the one Question, even if several Answers are voted for? The idea being that the person who asked the Question should be well placed to recognize what really helped them.

I worry about the wording: another way of phrasing "I'm done here!" is "The question can be closed" -- but Closed is what we use when we punt the question out of view saying "If you do not improve this question / make it relevant to the facility, then it will be deleted"

I also worry about the flow. If Voting and "I'm done" are too well separated, then people who ask Questions might not realize that saying "I'm done" does not reward the people who took the time to contribute. That would leave reputation increases up to the people who do know enough to take the extra step, together with whomever happens to wander by to vote. As there are times of year when we get over 200 new Questions per day, the resources of volunteers to go and deliberately check out topics to vote for Answers can be stretched too thin.

It is really helpful to my stress levels to be able to glance at the capsule information for a topic, see that one of the regular contributors has Answered, and then for me to just ignore it, knowing that the regular will do a decent job on it and be appropriately rewarded with an Accept. Having to go in and read 100+ Questions per day and assess Answers and Vote because otherwise the contributor won't get any acknowledgement... well, unfortunately, that is really wearing.

From time to time I do marathon days, answering and commenting until I burn out or fall asleep at my desk. Those come out as about 16 to 18 hours (with perhaps 1/2 hour for eating.) On those days I "touch" (contribute to somehow) at most 75 Questions, excluding ones I just reformat. And I sleep badly afterward and might be somewhat foggy the next day, from information overload. I find that once we hit more than about 75 Questions per day, that I can't read them and process them all -- not if I am going to do more than just look at the question and say "Yup, you've got a problem all right."

Matt J on 26 Feb 2017

I question whether that's true. For example, we see many homework posts in the forum where some answerers give very good hints while others spoonfeed the entire solution to the OP. The OP will tend to reward the latter, but in IMHO it is the former who gave the best help.

A fair point, but there are solutions. For example, you could make it so that "I'm done" automatically triggers an upvote, with all the same effects as if the OP upvoted directly. As one of these effects, the OP could not give additional upvotes to the answer after doing this.

Walter Roberson on 26 Feb 2017

"you could make it so that "I'm done" automatically triggers an upvote"

An upvote of what? All of the Answers posted at that time? Some of them might not be any good.

If the "I'm done" is attached to a specific Answer then what you propose becomes like the current Accept except that it does not move the selected answer to the top and (under your proposal) the poster would be barred from voting for other Answers later, which they currently are not.

I was thinking perhaps something more like the system noticing they haven't voted for anything in the question and asking them whether they are sure.

"The OP will tend to reward the latter, but in IMHO it is the former who gave the best help."

That does happen now to some extent. On the other hand, not everyone is doing homework, and not everyone who does homework is just looking for a fast solution.

For example when I posted a regexp question, I was the person in the best position to know which Answer(s) best explained the situation to me. No-one outside of me could know which Answer really twigged my understanding in the best way.

When I am Answering a Question and I use my Magic 8-Ball Rays to figure out what the poster is really stuck on and answer that, then my Answer is not necessarily the best Answer to what the Question looks like it is about, but it might be what the person needed.

Matt J on 27 Feb 2017

No, they wouldn't be barred from voting for other Answers, just from awarding the same Answer more than 2 points. In what I envision, an "I'm done" would be like an upvote in all respects except that it would also provide a visual flag on the Answer that the OP liked.

It is like the current system, except the OP's vote doesn't carry any more influence than anybody else's.

That does happen now to some extent. On the other hand, not everyone is doing homework, and not everyone who does homework is just looking for a fast solution.

There will always be a distribution of cases, but I don't think those people really suffer under what I propose. They still get to reward the Answer they liked and, with the "I'm done" flag, others in the forum would still know whether the OP's vote is up for grabs.

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Answer by Jan on 7 Mar 2017

Another point: Users should not get the power to remove flags on their own questions or comments.

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