Asking questions to add to the general knowledge pool

Question

Recently, I've seen a few examples of users asking questions and answering their own questions as a way of adding to the question pool here on MSE.

The most recent example I've seen of this is the following question, although it certainly is not the first.

In the past, I voted to close such questions. For example, user @LeAhnDung recently had posted a "question" on ordinal arithmetic, in the hopes of providing a general answer to all questions relating to the subject. While @AsafKaragila agreed with my evaluation that the question didn't fit MSE guidelines, it contributed to the confusion I hold today.

What is the appropriate way of handling these sorts of questions? Do we ignore them? Do we encourage them? Do we close them? Do they count as a form of reputation hunting? (In my experience, I haven't found the users who exhibit this behavior to be doing so for reputation, but it's plausible)

Answer 1

In this context I want to bring up two possible uses of self-answered questions. My goal in posting this as an answer is to poll our user base, and learn whether people find this palatable.

I am aware that theses cases form a tiny fraction of the possibilities related to self-answering. For the purposes of this discussion the point is that may be we can try and use these to get an idea of the scope of uses, and also get a feeling of how well they fit the SE format (neither is clear to me).

• Q&A pairs prepared for referrals. An example of such due to yours truly. My plan was to use that as an extension of the relevant tag wiki, and then refer to it in a tag wiki as well as whenever it comes up. Opportunities for this do occur, but may be not frequently enough to make it necessary to have a policy.
• Joriki suggested that self-answering could also be used for modularizing answers. That old meta thread never got enough attentin (IMHO). May be the modularization idea could also be used as an extension of abstract duplicates.

Answer 2

Since my self-answered question is the most recent example that OP has seen of this, and since I've posted such self-answered questions quite a bit (see here and here and here and here), I figured I should post an answer to at least make my own motivation clear. :)

I'm currently a teaching assistant for a precalculus class that I've been a teaching assistant for a few terms now. Each term, the students have nearly the same troubles with the same exercises, and I end up typing up the same solutions to email to them, or having the same conversation in office hours each term. This seems rather silly. So this term I've been quite a bit more active in using MathSE as a tool to post Q&As that I know my students would benefit from seeing. I realize that most of my more recent posts do not contain interesting questions. They're just exercises, and usually pretty basic ones at that. But they aren't bad questions either. They are questions that people legitimately have, in particular my students, so they certainly are adding the pool of useful content on this site, and certainly aren't doing any harm by existing. So to actually address your question of how to handle such posts: these self-answered questions should be judged by exactly the standard as any other post. If the questions is useful/clear/interesting then upvote it, and if the question is unclear/useless/disrespectful then downvote it. If a answer is good and addresses the question well then upvote it, and if the answer is wrong or doesn't address the question then downvote it.

To address the rep-farming bit, I didn't post any of my self-answered questions to get reputation; it's really just to have some Q&As posted somewhere convenient for me and my students that others might appreciate too. And honestly I'm rather flabbergasted at the voting patterns that I'm seeing on my self-answered posts. When I post such a question, I expect that the question itself will receive no upvotes (they are usually pretty basic questions afterall), but that my answers would receive a couple upvotes since I am making an effort to be thorough and write good solid answers for my students. But then you get cases like this answer of mine receiving 8 upvotes that, really, isn't worth 8 upvotes (originally there was no MathJax in the title of this post and it might have landed on the HNQ as quite a few basic questions do; none of these basic questions belong on the HNQ). And also this basic question that go two upvotes, whereas my answer got nothing. This illustrates how bizarre voting trends on MathSE can be, but I mean, really, this doesn't actually matter.

Answer 3

I have self-answered a few questions. At that time, I was reading a textbook thoroughly and I wanted to document answers to some questions that arose in my mind while I was reading the material. I felt that they were reasonable questions in the sense that any other student going through the same material would very likely have the same confusions that I had.

Here are the questions that I asked and answered while reading Hoffman and Kunze's Linear Algebra:

1. Proof of Theorem 7 (Chapter 5) in Hoffman and Kunze's *Linear Algebra* is unclear
2. Doubt in section 5.7 of Hoffman and Kunze's *Linear Algebra*

Here are the questions that I asked and answered while reading Patrick Morandi's Field and Galois Theory:

1. Doubt in proof of Theorem 3.19 from Patrick Morandi's *Field and Galois Theory*
2. Doubt in proof of Proposition 4.5 from Patrick Morandi's *Field and Galois Theory*

I had also asked this question on meta whether it would be appropriate to self-answer questions for the purpose of documenting clarifications to Morandi's textbook. The consensus was that if the proper context is provided then it should be okay. Indeed, some of my questions are not of the highest quality (clearly the titles are cringe-worthy), but they were not received negatively by the community because, I believe, the necessary context and motivation was provided.

My point is that even though I have self-answered questions before to add to the general knowledge pool, I cannot say with confidence when a self-answered question accomplishes this and when it fails to. However, I can definitely say that this comment (on my question on meta that I linked above) was very useful to me in deciding which sort of questions to leave out:

Just please make sure you ask a question in each and every post, and don't turn your ongoing posts into a blog. I.e., don't over do it. But the Question Answer format is a must. – amWhy Jun 28 at 23:29

To me, this "blog test" is the most useful method to decide which questions shouldn't be going on MSE.

Again, I'm not claiming that all of my above questions are a good fit for MSE either, but I know that without applying this discriminatory tool I might have posted many more lower quality questions for the purpose of "adding to the general knowledge pool".