Timeline for Which is better: editing someone's old but outdated answer to keep it up to date or making a new answer and adding a note to the old one?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
8 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Oct 25, 2021 at 16:09 | comment | added | jcollum | @Dan yeah I think that's very reasonable | |
| Oct 25, 2021 at 9:45 | comment | added | Dan | You can however edit the main answer and add some notice at the of the answer, for now, to mention that an answer is outdated and will not work after version XX.XX or some other reason. For example, askubuntu.com/a/256018/8698 | |
| Oct 25, 2021 at 5:24 | comment | added | Zanna Mod | Totally agree with this answer. One thing that might occasionally be okay is adding an index of answers to the question, if there are many answers and it's clear what versions of Ubuntu they pertain to, for example. There's a new feature in the pipeline to tag answers with version information that, if it does arrive on AU, is likely to mitigate this problem and make such indexing unnecessary :) | |
| Oct 25, 2021 at 1:36 | comment | added | muru | @jcollum I have two counterexamples where I posted updated answers to questions that had multiple existing answers (with hundreds of upvotes at the time) and even so mine has over the years accumulated 100+ upvotes. Since a small fraction of people vote, it follows thousands of people must have scrolled past multiple answers to reach mine. Letting upvotes do the work does work, even if slowly. | |
| Oct 24, 2021 at 19:16 | history | edited | Mark Kirby | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
added 33 characters in body
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| Oct 24, 2021 at 19:15 | comment | added | Mark Kirby | There is really not much you can do, you could ask the OP if you can edit a line in saying it doesnt work but it might not go down well. Here are a couple of posts on old answers meta.stackexchange.com/questions/217325/… meta.askubuntu.com/questions/15015/… I will add them in the answer in a bit. | |
| Oct 24, 2021 at 19:07 | comment | added | jcollum | The issue is that people will see an answer with 60+ upvotes, assume it is correct and up to date and start working through the troubleshooting steps in that answer without checking to see when the answer was created. The answer in question here is HUGE and it's very unlikely that someone will scroll all the way down to see when the answer was created. | |
| Oct 24, 2021 at 19:05 | history | answered | Mark Kirby | CC BY-SA 4.0 |