12
\$\begingroup\$

By the nature of tabletop games, rule books will come out that provide RAW answers to questions that have been asked before, were answered, and that answer was accepted; however, due to the new rule book that accepted answer is no longer correct.

This question's not an ideal example, but close enough for these purposes.

Is the burden solely on the original querent to remove and reassign the checkmark? Should we flag the question for moderator intervention? Or do nothing?

Alternately, is it appropriate to edit the accepted answer to indicate that it was provided prior to the release of material that contradicts or refines the answer?

\$\endgroup\$
4
  • 1
    \$\begingroup\$ this Q&A might be a better example? Maybe not, though, since the accepted answerer edited already to indicate obsolescence. \$\endgroup\$ – nitsua60 Dec 4 '17 at 17:45
  • 9
    \$\begingroup\$ FYI, we cannot remove or reassign the checkmark. The feature doesn't exist for diamond moderators or the community, and requests for anything like this are historically declined in favor of the community simply showing support via score alone. So that is not within our options for resolving this issue. \$\endgroup\$ – doppelgreener Dec 4 '17 at 18:14
  • 1
    \$\begingroup\$ [Related] When rules change but votes don't, how to handle it?Is there a way to remove wrong answers? \$\endgroup\$ – SevenSidedDie Dec 4 '17 at 18:33
  • \$\begingroup\$ Death to the green checkmark tyranny. Long live the upvotes. Now seriously, this (accepted answer) makes sense for SO where there is a technical problem that can be solved with technical steps. not so much for less technical stacks. \$\endgroup\$ – Mindwin Dec 10 '17 at 13:46
12
\$\begingroup\$

The only way to move a checkmark is by the question-asker doing it. Not even mods can override which answer the asker found most useful.

There's no expectation set by SE that the checkmark will correspond to the best answer anyway. The opposite is actually considered fine (emphasis mine):

Accepting an answer is not meant to be a definitive and final statement indicating that the question has now been answered perfectly. It simply means that the author received an answer that worked for him or her personally. Not every user comes back to accept an answer, and of those who do, they might not change the accepted answer even if a newer, better answer comes along later.

Stack Exchange is mindfully designed to frustrate any attempt by a single user to impose their view of correctness. Only the result of the voting system over time is given that privilege.

The urge to see our view of what's correct at the top of a page has to be channelled through the checks and balances of the existing tools: voting and, sometimes, writing better answers.

\$\endgroup\$
-1
\$\begingroup\$

We should be able to add a notice that an answer may no longer be accurate. That notice should probably go in the question though, because the answer should be to the question as posed. After all, we are curating a set of questions and answers, not blindly preserving them.

This situation should be fairly rare though.


Above is to establish a position. What follows is a strawman for how we might implement it:

I suggest that a reasonable method for doing this might be to ask a new question about how some answer has changed since the original question (and link the original), and cite at least one new source which plausibly changes a previously accepted answer. Then we preserve the normal voting process. If there is reasonably strong support for an answer saying there has been a change, we can add a notice (ideally standardized) to the old question, indicating something like:

Note: the rules for [game] may have been updated since this question was asked.

See [link] for details."

\$\endgroup\$
1
  • 5
    \$\begingroup\$ We are able to do this. It's called a bounty; one of the bounty reasons is "Current answers are outdated The current answer(s) are out-of-date and require revision given recent changes." \$\endgroup\$ – Please stop being evil Dec 9 '17 at 7:41

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .
https://rpg.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7609/how-to-resolve-the-checkmark-sitting-on-answers-now-made-incorrect-inaccurate-by?noredirect=1
rpg.meta.stackexchange.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2021-25
153971
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:ED4ZZMA465V4N5RF2BQJMMA6NO7IOUY6
<urn:uuid:ae2d6721-2552-4774-bb57-da4a168c6ac3>
2021-06-15T02:41:59Z
151.101.193.69
text/html
sha1:423QEWFED2HOGFJXXBSE6AXJQI3ZO2OG
<urn:uuid:776554b2-3085-4575-b76e-13d35ba1ce92>
https://rpg.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7609/how-to-resolve-the-checkmark-sitting-on-answers-now-made-incorrect-inaccurate-by?noredirect=1
response
<urn:uuid:591dd118-7224-4db3-906a-90c0caf1d090>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2021-25
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for June 2021
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-242.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.18 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.2-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: https://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/