# How to ask a question if I would like to answer it on my own?

According to an instruction in Help Center: Can I answer my own question? and an answer to a meta question Can I post a question and an answer just because I think it helps others?, answering one's own questions is encouraged. One (the only one if I don't remember wrong) of my questions of such kind (self-ask-and-answer):

was put on hold as off-topic [update: now reopened]: "This question is missing context or other details". I had added the "where the question comes from" information in the title. The following are two minor improvements I can immediately make to the post:

• According to the objection in this meta question to posting images, I should have typed out the question;
• One can definitely guess with provided contexts though, the definition of the notation $\mathcal{C}$ in the question is not explicit: it denotes the "Cantor set".

(Since my linked question is under discussion in this post, I have not done the improvements yet.)

Here is my question:

Other than the improvements mentioned above, what kinds of "contexts" would be expected for this particular kind (self-ask-and-answer) of questions?

I don't see how the instruction

"Please improve the question by providing additional context, which ideally includes your thoughts on the problem and any attempts you have made to solve it."

applies to such questions since I have explicitly stated in the post that "I would like to ask it here so that I can record my answer to the question."

• Did you follow the link provided in the message? – quid Dec 12 '17 at 1:07
• The one in the close message you quote. "improve the question" is a link to "How to ask a good question?" which contains various points. Arguably several are not relevant or already dealt with. One that could be relevant is "provide definitions." You do define what a Cantor set is in the answer, but it would be better in the question. (Also it's again a scan.) Also your background or some motivation why you want to record this particular problem could be interesting. – quid Dec 12 '17 at 1:14
• Personally I think if you post something like this you really should avoid images. And generally higher standards apply; I wrote about this earlier. The main reason why this might be useful at all is that somebody else could find it later on. Thus to have the text typed out is imperative. If this is not done, there is just no point in having it around at all. – quid Dec 12 '17 at 1:17
• Short answer: yes, you can do this. Readers may not have a positive response if you are simply repeating well known ground, esp. material that may already be in the Math.SE corpus. On the other hand, if there is a good problem or technique that has not been covered already, this might make a nice contribution. Additional context means what it does in any Question: What motivates the problem? What difficulty did a "naive" approach encounter, if any? Simply wanting to have the Community pay attention to your writing is not a very sympathetic posture. – hardmath Dec 12 '17 at 1:18
• @hardmath: "Simply wanting to have the Community pay attention to your writing" this is really harsh. I don't know where is such judgement comes from. – Jack Dec 12 '17 at 1:21
• This is ONLY self-ask-and-answer question I have posted so far. And I have no experience how to ask such question with proper contexts. That's exactly the reason why I ask this question: "Other than the improvements mentioned above, what kinds of 'contexts' would be expected for this particular kind (self-ask-and-answer) of questions?" – Jack Dec 12 '17 at 1:23
• @hardmath: "Additional context means what it does in any Question: What motivates the problem? What difficulty did a "naive" approach encounter, if any?" is very helpful and I would suggest you write this into an answer. Other than that, questioning my motive of this question with "Simply wanting to have the Community pay attention to your writing" is very insulting. – Jack Dec 12 '17 at 1:24
• My final sentence should not be read in isolation, and certainly not as a "judgement" on something you have yet to post. Instead read the entire Comment as a short answer to whether posting a Question solely "so that I can record my answer to the question" is allowed and what context should be supplied. If desired I'll expand on the short answer. – hardmath Dec 12 '17 at 1:44
• The language in the help center does not reflect the opinions of all participants of this site; it was created by the StackExchange group without consulting this site. There are a number of users, including myself, who do not favor self-answered questions. At the very least, if one is necessary, it should be written with the highest quality standards in mind, and you should consider marking the answer "community wiki" to avoid gaining reputation from it. In general, these things fit better on a personal blog than on this site, which is meant for questions the asker cannot yet answer. – Carl Mummert Dec 12 '17 at 11:01
• It has been closed once again, Jack. – Rohan Dec 12 '17 at 16:52
• I personally think one can almost say that marking the answer "community wiki" should be first priority before I doing anything else since otherwise there can always be false assumption that I'm doing this question-and-answer merely for the reputation thing. – Jack Dec 13 '17 at 16:35