Re-asking old questions with correct (but now dated) answers?

Question

What's the policy on old questions whose answers are no-longer current (but were correct at the time).

For example, this question: Seeking QGIS tutorials and web resources? - has a number of answers very highly rated. The problem is that quite a few of the links are pointing to outdated material now and don't relate to the current QGIS.

Is it worth re-asking the question seeking updated/current answers?

Or should we rely on users adding new answers to the old question? The issue here is that they'll never get upvoted and thus are less likely to be seen.

Thoughts?

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While @whuber's and @PolyGeo's answers are both very good, I still feel they don't work. I don't know what the "correct" answer here is, but these responses elicit several problems.

• We can't make the "accepted" answer non-accepted, and the accepted answer is always at the top.

• There aren't enough active members to down-vote all the upvotes of the now-incorrect leading answers.

• We would be punishing the users who once had the right answer by downvoting.

• The current incentive program (badges) is obviously insufficient for addressing this fully. For one thing a lot of them are /hard/ to get, even at bronze level, and require a very significant time commitment (or a lot of luck).

• Closing them isn't a solution because then it's impossible to get new answers unless re-asking the question is allowed.

• The site is heavily optimised to encourage new answers rather than substantially editing the content of old.

And probably the biggest issue of all:

• For various reasons, only a small fraction of users will use/edit old questions and provide new answers. This means the question is only getting a fraction of the exposure it got when it was a new question; thus any new answers are likely to be suboptimal.

• (This is also a problem with editing an answer).

Maybe the solution is to allow reposting of the question, but close the old one and stick a date on it. That way you've got a historical collection of answers and all are canonical for their period?

Answer 1

Please do not re-ask the question: that goes against one of the principal aims of the site, which is to have a well-organized canonical set of answers. Re-asking creates a duplicate. Duplication more than doubles the efforts of those who search the site for answers (including your moderators and many active community members who conduct these searches as a matter of course before answering questions).

If this community cannot or will not curate questions (by editing them and adding new answers as needed), then perhaps we should not be managing questions of this sort at all. Questions of fleeting interest or value and those that collect myriad varied results ought to be particularly suspect. Perhaps some of them should have been closed long ago and maybe they could be closed now?

That leaves us with the option of maintaining old questions. The site offers some incentives to do so, including

• Revival and Necromancer (silver) badges for answering old questions;

• The new Explainer, Refiner (silver), and Illuminator (gold) badges for answering and cleaning up a question;

• The Populist (gold) badge for jumping in with a recognizably better answer;

• The Disciplined badge for deleting one's own upvoted post;

• The Excavator and Archaeologist (silver) badges for editing inactive posts (these seem particularly apt); and even

• The badges for flagging problematic posts: Citizen Patrol, Deputy (silver), and Marshall (gold).

Engaged readers might want to take the existence of these badges as a personal challenge: can you earn all the bronze ones? Can you earn any of the silver or gold ones?

Answer 2

To address this dot point:

• We can't make the "accepted" answer non-accepted, and the accepted answer is always at the top.

A minor point is that the accepted answer is always at the top, unless an asker accepts an answer of their own - in which case its position is determined by its votes alone.

On the main point, I am not too concerned if the highest voted answer sometimes appears second when sorted on votes, because it never appears lower than that.

However, if there is a clearly incorrect answer accepted at the top then you could:

1. Make a comment to that effect
2. Edit to correct it - but be ready for a rollback if someone disagrees
3. Downvote it (a recommended action to any incorrect answer by the two top voted answers to What is the etiquette for correcting old questions with incorrect answers?)
4. Vote to delete it - but you need to be a trusted user (20,000+ rep) and for the answer to already be at -1; and
5. as a last resort, a flag to a moderator may lead to it being assessed for deletion, but if it is from a topic where they lack expertise, then without a preponderance of negative comments and downvotes already in place to guide their decision, it is most likely that it will remain.

By coincidence, I just came across an example where a Nice Question (with 10 votes) has an "incorrect"/"ill-advised" accepted answer with -14 votes at its top (ahead of an answer with 8 votes): Consuming Google Maps as background map through ArcGIS Server? I have added it here to show that it is not just hypotheticals being discussed.

Can we exempt downvoted accepted answers from getting the top spot? is worth a read too.

There is a feature request at Meta Stack Exchange that may also help in this situation: Keeping special status for Accepted Answers without sticking them to top forever?

Answer 3

I think this answer (which I am now updating) is a good place to address this part of your question:

• For various reasons, only a small fraction of users will use/edit old questions and provide new answers. This means the question is only getting a fraction of the exposure it got when it was a new question; thus any new answers are likely to be suboptimal.

I don't know of any statistics to show how views of questions tail off over time if no editing is performed, but I suspect that would happen to lower profile questions, which is why I think Editing is Essential to keep returning any valuable Q&As to the active queue in a slightly (preferably significantly) better state each time.

I think this is especially true of any Shopping List questions with high profile, like the one you cite, because it is currently #6 on the self-assembling FAQ for QGIS here. In other words, I think it may still be getting a lot more exposure than you think.

I would encourage everyone to use their editing privileges to improve answers by adding content which is new (or consolidated from other brief answers to the same question).

Questions such as this one draw many visitors and future users to our site, so I think it is important that they have a well constructed question with fewer great answers rather than a long list of answers that includes some that might now be considered ordinary.

How aggressively should we maintain and improve very popular questions? looks like it may be worth reading here too.

If you are wondering how to identify the "very popular" questions, which I think are also those most likely to be the duplicates you seek when you read a question and think "I'm sure that's been asked lots of times before" then I recommend becoming familiar with the frequent tab to highlight them in the results of any tag search you do. The FAQ for QGIS is one example, and another is FAQ of ArcGIS for Desktop OR ArcPy.