We encourage questions with instant self-answers, like How do I return the response from an asynchronous call? and How do I melt a pandas dataframe?. This category of questions contains some of the most useful content on the site.
The trouble is that other of these questions don't stand on their own without the instant self-answer and tend to be low-quality, essentially a placeholder or strawman to facilitate the one answer. Often, the question is too broad, blatantly off-topic, hyper-specific to OP, is an XY problem, or doesn't contain enough context such that another user might reasonably answer the question.
Examples include:
- Error: apiRequestContext.get: getaddrinfo ENOTFOUND Playwright
- PuppeteerSharp fails to display base64-encoded images in PDF output
- Can't run bddgen getting "please install playwright-bdd"
- Setting up a Rails app in devcontainer with Capybara and Playwright for headless and non-headless system rspec tests
- Unable to get Laravel Spatie/Browsershot working with Puppeteer, Ubuntu 24.04, PHP 8.3, Chrom & Nginx (10k+ rep)
- Typescript : How to catch API response in playwright? (10k+ rep)
- Playwright tests tearing down before my test is run (10k+ rep)
- How do I configure eslint for playwright? (10k+ rep)
- Cypress / percy snapshots don't show canvas content (10k+ rep)
The current text on self answering in our help center makes no mention of quality, which is well-established in meta answers like this one. Would it be useful to add a paragraph like this to the help center guidelines?
When asking a question with the intent to self-answer, ensure the question adheres to our normal guidelines for questions and is answerable by other users.
This text is just an initial proposal, open for adjustment.
I understand some instant self-answered questions wind up being useful even if the question is otherwise low-quality. Here's an example: Minimal Hibernate 4 XML configuration with Spring 3 for annotation based transaction management and object mapping?. This is somewhat borderline--I can easily see this question not working out well, but it appears to have been useful by virtue of the self-answer, a common scenario.
I don't think the additional question quality guideline proposed here will have the unintended side effect of discouraging these borderline-quality instant self-answer questions, and might help steer them towards excellent self-answered questions, like CanvasContext2D drawImage() issue [onload and CORS], which I'd like to see more of.
My fundamental premise is that the question in an FAQ or instant self-answer is as important to making the thread useful as the answer is, by establishing proper context and enabling other answers that might be worthwhile additions to OP's self-answered solution.
