An idea I've had for a long time is that "the community" can vote to override an accepted answer. There are many times when the accepted answer is incorrect, or a newer answer is now more correct, but the only person who can change an accepted answer is the OP.
I think community-based changes to the accepted answer would go a long way to solving your problem too, but it requires someone to be reviewing newer answers and identifying when there's another that would be more appropriate.
It'd incentivise writing newer answers to older questions. Correcting accepted answers that probably weren't ideal to begin with. A new "role" where users hunt through older questions and answers looking for improvements to make.
Stack Overflow answers are supposed to be community-based, but we unfairly prioritise the will of the original questioner *forever*. I don't think that's optimal.
As a side gig I teach an intro to web development class online. Every semester I get students asking for help about why their code isn’t working. Nine times out of ten, they are trying to use some jQuery code they copied from stackoverflow because it is the accepted answer. They don’t yet know enough to recognize that it isn’t vanilla JavaScript (which they are required to use).
What platform do you use to teach the course? I've been teaching an ML from scratch course for junior devs at my company and think it'd be useful for others.
> but the only person who can change an accepted answer is the OP.
This system makes the person arguably _least qualified_ to understand the situation the single arbitrator as to which answer is accepted.
Was it the most efficient? First to answer? Copied-and-pasted right in with no integration work? Written by someone with an Indian username? Got the most upvotes? Made a Simpsons reference? Written by someone with an Anime avatar?
The argument is probably that while they are the best qualified to know whether it solved their issue, they're not qualified about whether it was the best way to solve their issue, since they had to ask in the first place.
Well, they do know the tech stack, the domain, the specific problem. Now they know whether the solution resolved their specific problem, if their code review/testing caught any bugs, etc, etc.
If anything, they have the most amount of information in this context. I really don't think of them as being the least qualified.
Yeah there’s an argument for that. I think it’d hold more weight if narrow, specific, and loosely defined duplicate questions were allowed - but they aren’t.
Questions and answers belong to the community. I think the accepted answer should too - maybe after some period of time.
Currently the only incentive to post a new answer to an old question is you get a special badge. That's neat but limited. I've gone through old R questions and posted answers with a more modern syntax and my answers rarely get much attention.
I'd be cautious about overriding an accepted answer. Imagine a situation where there's an easy-to-understand algorithm that's O(n^2) and the "Correct" algorithm that's O(n). If OP only has a dozen datapoints, the former might be the best answer for her specific problem, despite it clearly not being the right approach for most people finding the thread via Google in the future.
They actually recently added this feature - you have a "this answer is outdated" button you can press. Note sure what the reputation threshold to see it is.
"An idea I've had for a long time is that "the community" can vote to override an accepted answer."
I don't know if this is still a thing, but for some time in the past when an answer was edited more than a certain amount of times it automatically turned into what was called a "community wiki" answer.
Or you could just edit the accepted answer if it’s wrong? I’ve seen a few posts where the top contains an “UPDATE” that, in summary, links to another answer.
I think community-based changes to the accepted answer would go a long way to solving your problem too, but it requires someone to be reviewing newer answers and identifying when there's another that would be more appropriate.
It'd incentivise writing newer answers to older questions. Correcting accepted answers that probably weren't ideal to begin with. A new "role" where users hunt through older questions and answers looking for improvements to make.
Stack Overflow answers are supposed to be community-based, but we unfairly prioritise the will of the original questioner *forever*. I don't think that's optimal.