Communities

Writing
Writing
Codidact Meta
Codidact Meta
The Great Outdoors
The Great Outdoors
Photography & Video
Photography & Video
Scientific Speculation
Scientific Speculation
Cooking
Cooking
Electrical Engineering
Electrical Engineering
Judaism
Judaism
Languages & Linguistics
Languages & Linguistics
Software Development
Software Development
Mathematics
Mathematics
Christianity
Christianity
Code Golf
Code Golf
Music
Music
Physics
Physics
Linux Systems
Linux Systems
Power Users
Power Users
Tabletop RPGs
Tabletop RPGs
Community Proposals
Community Proposals
tag:snake search within a tag
answers:0 unanswered questions
user:xxxx search by author id
score:0.5 posts with 0.5+ score
"snake oil" exact phrase
votes:4 posts with 4+ votes
created:<1w created < 1 week ago
post_type:xxxx type of post
Search help
Notifications
Mark all as read See all your notifications »
Q&A

Welcome to Codidact Meta!

Codidact Meta is the meta-discussion site for the Codidact community network and the Codidact software. Whether you have bug reports or feature requests, support questions or rule discussions that touch the whole network – this is the site for you.

Post History

80%
+6 −0
Q&A Disallowing quoting question parts in answers, rather, in comments only

Quoting parts of questions in answers is a problem because it prevents the legitimacy of a question's OP to try to improve a bad question in case community members think the question is bad by he...

posted 3y ago by Lundin‭

Answer
#1: Initial revision by user avatar Lundin‭ · 2021-04-22T06:40:18Z (over 3 years ago)
> Quoting parts of questions in answers is a problem because it prevents the legitimacy of a question's OP to try to improve a bad question in case community members think the question is bad by heavily downvoting it, let along, explaining severe problems unclarity or misleadingness in the question.

If the question is so bad/unclear that it risks getting closed or simply can't be answered, then it shouldn't be answered. Those who answer anyway with speculations risk down votes too. So the scenario you describe is quite unlikely.

Now in case a question wasn't bad but it needs a drastic clarification - "this applies to both X and Y, which one are you asking about?" Then that's problematic too. Suppose someone gives an answer about "X", then the OP changes the question so that it's now only about "Y". This turns potentially good answers into bad ones and off-topic at that. Such changes to the question should not be allowed once answers have been posted, in case the changes make the answer obsolete. This is the standard scenario for an edit rollback of the question. Better then to ask a new, narrowed-down question.

Otherwise if the improvements of the question are minor and there are answers quoting old revisions, the answers should be possible to edit into shape. If it isn't possible to do so because it would change the meaning of the answer, then those changes to the question shouldn't have been made in the first place.