PSA: When reviewing, remember to think of the future!

Question

I've been reviewing a ton lately and the version tags are becoming worse and worse.

Note to selves, Jeff warned us about this:

• When should we use the versions tags?

Version tags can be dangerous if the community starts to believe that every question, no matter what, has to have a version tag.

Dun dun dun!

Answer 1

When reviewing, if you notice a question has a version tag for no reason and it can be be dropped, then there's no need for it. We can leave the version in the question or whatever, but if something applies to multiple ubuntu versions then just leave it out of the question.

Here's some other things I do:

• If a question needs a new answer for a new version, bounty it for an update.
• Add "For 11.10" and so on headers to answers that are version specific.
• In the extreme case, like this one, add a little Table of Contents at the top. Luckily we don't have many of these.

FAQ

But wait Jorge, how did we get into this mess, you old users who set this policy really painted us into a wall, we should be allowed to punch you.

Ah yeah, we did, the other alternative was no version tags at all, then we'd have "How do I do foo in 11.04?" "How do I do foo in 11.10?" "How do I do foo in 12.04?" and so on. To me that seems way worse and would make consolidation a total nightmare. At least we have the multiversion nightmares consolidating into individual questions.

Hindsight and time machines and all that.

How do I help fix this problem?

There's a good portion of things that can be version agnostic, when you're editing and so on and you know it can apply to multiple versions, then do so!

Our really high traffic questions are usually already generalized, so if you run into an older question that can be modified to be useful for our future selves, then do it!