5 Golden Rules to Answering
A month ago, we presented a blog outlining the five golden rules to ask questions on Answers. After receiving good feedback the community and based on your suggestions, we have decided to give out the five golden rules about answering questions. After all, what would a great question be without a great answer? Here are the rules to ensure quality-answers which will certainly improve the site’s content.
1. Remember that you are answering to help the asker: Don’t answer just for the sake of getting points or to advertise your own questions to the community. IF you don’t know the answer, skip to a question you may be more knowledgeable about. And remember, we now have suggested questions for active users. These are questions that will automatically appear on your homepage. If you want to learn more about this feature, click here.
2. Be polite and respectful: No one likes to be ridiculed and insulted. If you don’t agree with the question, offer your point of view in a constructive and respectfully. Answers IS a diverse community where everyone is entitled to their own opinion. If you feel that a question or answer violates the community guidelines, report it. Learn more about the reporting system here.
3. Use correct spelling: Avoid sms language and grammatical errors. An answer filled with spelling mistakes and typos is confusing and doesn’t improve the Answers quality. The more understandable your answer is, the higher the opportunities it has to be chosen as best answer or make an impression on someone else.
4. Be relevant: Don’t digress or change the subject when answering a question. Give a concise answer that sticks to the point.
5. Link to existing sources that have the answer to the question: If you know an excellent website or book that might help, mention it – as long as it’s not spam of course. Also cite your sources, they are always helpful if anyone wants more information.
If you want to know more about it, don’t hesitate to visit our community guidelines and our help pages. Feel free also to share with the community some good questions or answers that you found on the site in your comments to this post.
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The improvements you have made are massive. It has been my intent to bring some ethical discussion or thought into my answers to some questions, of a sort which are now far less likely to appear on the site.
In the religion and spirituality along with the political categories of questions, I still notice some ad hominem remarks both in questions and answers. Also, there are some sexist, racist and universalist remarks made about particular groups of people in a stereotypical fashion. I often ask for statistical or empirical evidence of statements of questioners when answering, saying without such I cannot make an informed answer.
While rules may not apply in these cases, perhaps, we need to remind those asking and answering to remember the feelings of others and that people different from ‘us’; racially, politically, religiously, etc. can be just as smart as the ‘we’ are.
Again, keep up the good work.
¶ I may not know the answer, if the question requires searching online to find the best place to find the answers, if I can not find a related answer, then I will leave be. I could come back and try again within the time limit, spending hours to find nothing or little is too much sometimes, but it may take a few days to find the one item, then the computer crashes, whoa…
¶ Agree that answers could be polite and positive, no foul language please, though note some words are in the dictionary, and while some negative terms are allowed, others are *asterisked out,
¶ Spelling can be tricky, even with spell checker here, that sometimes the word is overlooked, and have notice periodically that checker ignores red underline words when right or wrongly spelled, too many pages and flash / java types ads, conflict with editing,
¶ sms (Short Message Service) vs url (Uniform Resource Locator) acronyms Ｉ♥ＮＹ , hmmm…
¶ Going off topic does occur, sometimes it is not related to question, but related to part of the answerers answer, through search or personal
¶ Link to existing sources is easy enough, some older archived answers with links may be obsolete now years layer, or the directory, it may be good to place name of the link , so if link error occurs, the company or actual name is listed and re-search-able,
¶ have a nice day:)
For Yahoo Answers to truly be a community, it must be community policed. By this I mean that reports of misuse, apeals,etc. should be decided on by the YA community, not a hireling, who perhaps, has no expertise in the appropriate field.
Do away with the points system, and you will eliminate trolls and point gamers.
U may kindly include 2 more rules. 1) Let answers be crisp and clear. Explanation to an answer need not be given. 2) Let the answer be one which does not direct the asker to go in search of some other source.May everyone remember that AN UNQUESTIONED ANSWER IS NO MATCH TO AN UNANSWERED QUESTION. -bhaarathi bhaaskaran Chennai India
I think that it is great that you have community guidelines to help people when they ask or answer questions. I still notice that some profanity is used and people do not answer the question to help the person but only to score points. I agree with Jims that you should do away with the points system.
I agree… People need to read the guidelines… I’ve seen a lot of problems in the pets/dogs secton, horrible answers and advertisements too… I love answers!