When we discussed the Back It Up rule before ChrisF suggested adding the rule to the FAQ when we go public to make sure people are aware of it (when they bother to look). His post was highly voted and public opinion seems to be with him.
We're public now. Should this be added to the FAQ? What should the exact wording be?
As a moderator on parenting.se, I thought it might be helpful for me to share our experiences with this rule.
That clause was part of our original faq from day one. From our perspective, adding it was intended to reduce answers that are essentially "I don't have any experience with this, but this is how I think it would work". Those types of answers are frequently of very low quality, and they can be a fairly persistent problem.
Ideally, we prefer answers that cite actual research and references. That isn't always possible, depending upon the question. In the cases where research isn't available, direct experience is usually a welcome substitute.
After all, the stackexchange sites are intended to be a repository for expert answers.
If an expert says "this is how I handled it", the answer is generally useful, whereas if the answer is pure speculation, even if the speculation comes from an expert, it tends to be much less useful.
There seems to be a perception here that the wording used somehow encourages low-quality answers. This has absolutely not been my experience. People don't look at the faq, read that, and start posting "me too!" answers that don't provide useful information. The users who do that generally haven't read the faq in the first place.
Rather, what we've found is that including that clause in the faq gives our community a point of reference to help explain to posters why certain answers are considered low quality.
In my nearly 10 months of moderating at parenting.se, I've never seen that section of the faq used to justify a low-quality answer. Instead, what typically happens is it is brought up by way of explanation to a new user, to explain why their answer is being down-voted, or to help show them what the answer needs to be improved. I've seen both moderators and active members of the community cite the clause from the faq, and it has always (to my recollection) resulted in a positive outcome (future answers from that user tend to improve, and sometimes they will go back, edit their answer, and provide useful sources and references).
It is worth mentioning that we do not enforce this rigidly, nor have we ever had any reason to. We do have plenty of high quality answers that do not reference direct experience or external research and sources. Those answers continue to get upvoted/accepted, and no one has ever said "this is a good answer, but I see no evidence that it meets our criteria for the 'back-it-up' rule."
I believe strongly that it will benefit you as a community to have the clause included in your faq from the beginning.
Here is proposed wording that does not beg for anecdotes:
It is never sufficient to simply say what you think the answer is. You must always include in your answer information about why you think your answer is correct, including citations for factual statements wherever possible, so that the community can evaluate the provenance of your answer.
I'm all for putting some kind of "Back it up" wording in the FAQ, but particularly with workplace issues a lot of suggestions may come from but second/third hand sources, or you have a strong opinion based on years in the field (e.g. my answer on Should you always counter the first offer letter?).
There are plenty of good, sound answers that may not come with research or first-hand empirical weight to back them up, and if we don't want to force those out or have the site degrade into FAQ rules-lawyering, so we need to be careful how we approach this: I think it should be expressed as a preference rather than a requirement.
On the subject of enforcing the policy, when Server Fault redid our FAQ a while back we didn't add a "back it up" clause -- the community expectation is that you will back up what you're saying, and voting patterns favor answers that give supporting data/reasons, so there was no need to explicitly call it out (the idea never even came up as far as I recall).
That community is way larger than we are, but I think self-policing with rep & votes rather than heavy-handed deleting is a preferable enforcement strategy.
I think it's a great idea to try and stop the "here is what I would do" kind of answers, however I would change the wording a bit
I would want to
I'm not really sure of a good way of phrasing that though. Here's my initial draft...
We strive to provide high-quality answers here, so please refrain from posting your own answer to a question unless you can back up your answer with either a reference or personal experience.
So far we have been addressing issues with questions as they come up. The question quality has come up and now that we are getting new people in the quality is staying high for the most part.
I could see potentially requiring sources for claims of fact should that need arise. This site is intended to be softer in that these are mostly soft skills we are dealing with. Many times there may be more than one way of dealing with an issue. So long as the question can be answers in a single answer I am ok with that.
Calling for anecdotes is the wrong approach. I am ok with anecdotes being used to back up an answer but when we start requiring stories we end up with a bunch of (metaphorical) "This one time at band camp," posts. I think that is a direction we do not want to go.
