What can be done to remove obsolete answers?

Question

I have seen many times a new question being marked as a "Duplicate". When going to the page with the "duplicated" question, (which often has little to do with the duplicate question), I sometimes see answers with lots of votes, (and of course lots of votes equates to the best answer).

The problem arises when the answer is many years old, is obsolete, no longer valid and could cause a user much frustration attempting to apply it to a recent version of Ubuntu.

Such answers include: Unetbootin, usb-creator, Winusb, syslinux persistent partitions, etc. Often times the given answer has nothing to do with the old question.

The best solution would seem to be to remove the obsolete answers, or at least the votes for these obsolete answers. It would not be fair to remove these votes from a person's score as the answers have served their purpose and the person would likely not return to Ask.

Is there a way to mark an answer as obsolete? to at least give users a warning? It does not help technology to keep pointing to old solutions, (if that was the case we would all be driving Model T's).

Answer 1

There are two distinct issues here, both solved by more considerate voting.

• Duplicates should only ever be relevant to their close-targets. Seriously. If you see things often being flagged as duplicate where they're not relevant, you should be flagging those closed questions.

  If it's not immediately obvious why something is duplicate (very common when the question is open-ended and the OP doesn't really know what's going on), somebody involved in the closure of something should take a couple of seconds to explain why it's duplicate.

• People voting to close should also be weighing up the relevancy of an old question to the new question's release. Most command line questions are going to be relevant for the next few decades (or until systemd replaces bash) but a 12.04 Upstart Q&A probably isn't going to help somebody on 16.10.

  Remember that we still support 12.04. Practically every old answer on the site is still relevant in some way to a supported release.

So again, these are both issues that are best solved by the people voting. If you don't have the technical know-how to weigh up if something is a duplicate, you really shouldn't be voting on it. Skip to the next one.

Answer 2

First of all, removing "obsolete" answers isn't a good idea. You'd be surprised that there are many regular users as well as actually legitimate enterprise level organizations that use older versions of Ubuntu, nevermind older versions of Linux kernel in general. Those answers can be useful for them. If all "obsolete" answers are removed, you'll see whole lot of users coming here asking about their outdated OS issues, and we've nothing to provide except close-vote. So unless StackOverflow decides that obsolete answers will cost them too much in hamsters , those answers probably should remain on the site.

There are however several ways that you can address the issue:

• leave a comment; chances are the answer author is still around and active user on the site, so there's a good chance they'll update the post.
• Edit the post to add newer information. Be careful here though - adding lengthy procedures and/or scrips will go against that user's original intention and could be considered as a destructive edit
• Post your own answer with bold text stating that your answer is for specific Ubuntu version or range of Ubuntu versions since particular one. This is a very very common approach , and I'd personally recommend it.
• Ask a new question ! Duplicate questions that require newer information/updated solutions are perfectly acceptable on the site. Just put in bold text to let people not to close your question as duplicate since older answers don't work. (admittedly there's a problem with hot-headed users who like to close all the things, but if you leave several hundred comments, flag for moderator to come over and yell at the "kids", or simply put everything in bold and italics, then you can save the question ).

See for example this answer: https://askubuntu.com/a/19324/295286 It keeps all the original content, while also provides updated information for systems 15.04 and above. It takes effort to write something this consistent and detailed with every new release. Now multiply that effort times a thousand, because there's thousands of great answers like this. Sure, they might be dated, but again - easily solvable with posts being updated or by posting your own answer to address the void

Answer 3

We need to bring in a few practical issues involved in what you suggest:

• To decide if an answer not only is obsolete, but also gives no useful information whatsoever to solve the problem, is at least quite subjective, probably undoable. I remember occasions where answers were strictly taken obsolete, but gave me nevertheless useful information to look in the right direction.
• Apart from that, also because of that, making decisions on what answers are obsolete or not, would be a very time consuming task. Who would you like to do that? How would you suggest to create consensus on that?

Already mentioned, but nothing keeps you from adding an answer, starting with for 16.04:.

Removing possibly obsolete answers would make things unnecessarily complicated, make us lose valuable content, is a burden to the review- capacity and would make no sense to the voting system.