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Peter Cordes
Peter Cordes
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The beauty of Stack Overflow is that old answers can be edited by anyone, especially high-rep users, in arbitrary ways, not just rolling stuff back.

In this case, edit answers which make outdated references to contents of other answers, edit to say "in an earlier version of <somebody>'s answer" (avoid "the accepted answer" because that can change). You might even go so far as mentioning that the answer is now functionally identical, too.

Or for answers that are different from the accepted answer and fully make sense without comparing themselves to other answers, simply remove the reference. Some kind of comparison of the advantages of one way vs. another can be an appropriate edit if the editor is sure enough they understand the situation to describe it accurately, to point out when you'd want to use this answer vs. when you'd want to use another answer.

(These edits that remove stuff should be done by user(s) with 2000+ rep, as reviewers won't have context to know why the change is needed - the improvement is in relation to other answers, not the question or that answer. Just adding "an earlier version of" should be fairly obvious to any reviewer, but removing references might not look good to reviewers. An edit message of "accepted answer has changed" should be enough, but you might take up reviewers' time examining the situation. So best to sidestep the review queue by having a higher-rep user do it.)

If the owners of those answers in need of editing are still active and want to do anything more / other than that, they can edit themselves. Old answers do sometimes need maintenance, and if users don't do it themselves, it's something other community members should do.

The two problem in this situation are:

  • duplicate answers
  • outdated references to old versions of other answers.

The 2nd part is pretty trivially fixable, and in a way that leaves an explanation at least for future readers. Hopefully in a way that's good enough that mere duplication is understandable and not a big enough problem that anyone feels distracted by a desire to invest further time on cleanup. (Other than maybe some users deleting their own answers if they're no longer relevant.)

Rolling stuff back seems like a worse solution.

The beauty of Stack Overflow is that old answers can be edited by anyone, especially high-rep users, in arbitrary ways, not just rolling stuff back.

In this case, edit answers which make outdated references to contents of other answers, edit to say "in an earlier version of <somebody>'s answer" (avoid "the accepted answer" because that can change). You might even go so far as mentioning that the answer is now functionally identical, too.

Or for answers that are different from the accepted answer and fully make sense without comparing themselves to other answers, simply remove the reference. Some kind of comparison of the advantages of one way vs. another can be an appropriate edit if the editor is sure enough they understand the situation to describe it accurately, to point out when you'd want to use this answer vs. when you'd want to use another answer.

If the owners of those answers in need of editing are still active and want to do anything more than that, they can edit themselves. Old answers do sometimes need maintenance, and if users don't do it themselves, it's something other community members should do.

The two problem in this situation are:

  • duplicate answers
  • outdated references to old versions of other answers.

The 2nd part is pretty trivially fixable, and in a way that leaves an explanation at least for future readers. Hopefully in a way that's good enough that mere duplication is understandable and not a big enough problem that anyone feels distracted by a desire to invest further time on cleanup. (Other than maybe some users deleting their own answers if they're no longer relevant.)

Rolling stuff back seems like a worse solution.

The beauty of Stack Overflow is that old answers can be edited by anyone, especially high-rep users, in arbitrary ways, not just rolling stuff back.

In this case, edit answers which make outdated references to contents of other answers, edit to say "in an earlier version of <somebody>'s answer" (avoid "the accepted answer" because that can change). You might even go so far as mentioning that the answer is now functionally identical, too.

Or for answers that are different from the accepted answer and fully make sense without comparing themselves to other answers, simply remove the reference. Some kind of comparison of the advantages of one way vs. another can be an appropriate edit if the editor is sure enough they understand the situation to describe it accurately, to point out when you'd want to use this answer vs. when you'd want to use another answer.

(These edits that remove stuff should be done by user(s) with 2000+ rep, as reviewers won't have context to know why the change is needed - the improvement is in relation to other answers, not the question or that answer. Just adding "an earlier version of" should be fairly obvious to any reviewer, but removing references might not look good to reviewers. An edit message of "accepted answer has changed" should be enough, but you might take up reviewers' time examining the situation. So best to sidestep the review queue by having a higher-rep user do it.)

If the owners of those answers in need of editing are still active and want to do anything more / other than that, they can edit themselves. Old answers do sometimes need maintenance, and if users don't do it themselves, it's something other community members should do.

The two problem in this situation are:

  • duplicate answers
  • outdated references to old versions of other answers.

The 2nd part is pretty trivially fixable, and in a way that leaves an explanation at least for future readers. Hopefully in a way that's good enough that mere duplication is understandable and not a big enough problem that anyone feels distracted by a desire to invest further time on cleanup. (Other than maybe some users deleting their own answers if they're no longer relevant.)

Rolling stuff back seems like a worse solution.

Source Link
Peter Cordes
Peter Cordes
  • 380.7k
  • 1
  • 52
  • 84

The beauty of Stack Overflow is that old answers can be edited by anyone, especially high-rep users, in arbitrary ways, not just rolling stuff back.

In this case, edit answers which make outdated references to contents of other answers, edit to say "in an earlier version of <somebody>'s answer" (avoid "the accepted answer" because that can change). You might even go so far as mentioning that the answer is now functionally identical, too.

Or for answers that are different from the accepted answer and fully make sense without comparing themselves to other answers, simply remove the reference. Some kind of comparison of the advantages of one way vs. another can be an appropriate edit if the editor is sure enough they understand the situation to describe it accurately, to point out when you'd want to use this answer vs. when you'd want to use another answer.

If the owners of those answers in need of editing are still active and want to do anything more than that, they can edit themselves. Old answers do sometimes need maintenance, and if users don't do it themselves, it's something other community members should do.

The two problem in this situation are:

  • duplicate answers
  • outdated references to old versions of other answers.

The 2nd part is pretty trivially fixable, and in a way that leaves an explanation at least for future readers. Hopefully in a way that's good enough that mere duplication is understandable and not a big enough problem that anyone feels distracted by a desire to invest further time on cleanup. (Other than maybe some users deleting their own answers if they're no longer relevant.)

Rolling stuff back seems like a worse solution.