How to answer "is it safe to install...... questions?

Question

I am noticing lately that there is an increasing number of question asking "is it safe to install..... something (like this one).

My instinct says they should be flagged as answerers may have different opinions based on their experience, but I wanted to ask in meta to be sure.

Answer 1

I don't think we should be closing these questions.

Many if not most of them have perfectly good objective answers. If answers are coming off as people's opinions, without any real weight behind them, then the answers are the problem, not the questions.

To properly answer a question about whether or not something is safe (whether or not it's a question about installing anything), we should usually either:

• Say it's not safe, and why it's not safe. If there are major mitigating factors that would make it safe in some circumstances, they should likely be discussed, while emphasizing that it's not safe in the major use case.
• Say it's safe, and why it's not going to cause harm. Any obvious or explicitly stated concerns should be addressed. If it's safe in general but not under certain circumstances, those circumstances should be mentioned if possible (at least if they're likely to occur).

There may be competing answers asserting different viewpoints, but so long as they're backed up with objective facts and clear reasoning, that's not necessarily different from questions like, "How do I accomplish X?"

However, some questions about what's safe might, in practice, be unanswerable, and those should be closed.