Marking questions as answered when they are, and adding them to FAQ

[CosmicVoyager]

Greetings,

Something can be done now thanks to crowdsourcing via the internet that could not be done before with books. Most questions asked here can be answered thanks to the combined knowledge, imagination, and explanatory skills of a vast number of people. And those answers can be updated if need be.

When the asker is satisfied the question has been answered, it should be marked as answered and added to a FAQ.

If someone has further questions about a topic, merely addressing that as it in a post as it is done now causes the complete answer to be spread out through the thread. What is needed is the complete answer in one post. So instead of just responding, the answer should be updated. It should be improved.

So you have a list FAQs and the post that is the "current best answer" complete and easy to find rather that having to read through a hundred post thread.

The point is, the answers to many important questions exist here but the complete answers are scattered all over. Each FAQ should have a "current best answer" which is revised if someone has further questions.

For example, the balloon analogy. Has that been answered yet? One has to read through pages of posts to try to find out, and the answer might not even be there yet.

If not here, somewhere. So much time could be saved and so many people's important questions that desperately seek the answers to can be found.

Thanks

 

[fss]

Won't work for most questions. There are too many of them.

 

[micromass]

Well CosmicVoyager has a point in my opinion. Of course, there are too many questions, so it would be to much to put every question in the FAQ, it would just be to large!

However, there are some frequently recurring questions that appear a lot. And posting an FAQ of the most frequent questions would be very handy!
I'm thinking of an FAQ that explains the racecar on a train-analogy that is supposed to be a counterexample for relativity, the fact that 1=0.9999..., what exactly is infinity?, and some more topics that appear a lot...

 

[Grep]

I'm not so sure the people asking these questions (for the most part) would bother to read the FAQ at all. I mean a lot of those types of questions have been answered to death, and are generally easily answered with a quick forum or Google search.

The real problem is perhaps that many people don't bother to do even the smallest bit of research before asking a question.

Sometimes I'm really tempted to link people through http://lmgtfy.com/ when they ask those kinds of questions.