Placeholder answer posts

Question

What exactly is the word "there" in an existential construction? And related questions

This question recently had an answer posted to it that came up in the first post queue, (which I've screencapped in case it's deleted in the meantime) which simply states:

This is a place-holding answer, just in case this thread accidentally gets closed. - araucaria

I haven't acted on this queue item.

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I guess there are questions to be asked about this behaviour:

1. Are such answers acceptable?
   I can't recall seeing anything like this on ELL recently, but I don't know whether I'm just too new to the stack to be familiar with it. Does it appear on other stacks?
2. Are we gaining a reputation (whether justified or not) for too quickly closing questions (whether justified or not)?
   This kind of reputation is no doubt harmful and detrimental to the organic supply of high-quality questions and answers. Is is something that we're becoming known for? We've had other threads about whether we're closing too quickly
3. Should we be answering questions that are of dubious quality?
   My instinctive answer to this, based on nothing more than my own sentiment and experience, is that we ought not to be encouraging low-quality questions with answers, no matter how tempting it is to do it for the reputation. Doing it solely to assist a fellow human? Probably more acceptable, but again, I'm not sure.

What do we think?

Also, I'm not sure whether these should all be separate questions, which we can certainly do; but I think they're related to each other enough so that for now, I'm comfortable posting it as one.

Answer 1

Please note that this answer does contain a large amount of my own bias on the issues. I'm aware of this, and I leave it to others to write a more neutral response.

Regardless of how funny the answer may be, (and I do agree that there's humour value in this instance,) this isn't appropriate by SE or ELL standards. The joke would have worked just as well if Araucaria had left a comment along the lines of "I should post a placeholder quick, before they lock this thing!" Call slippery-slope on this if you must, but if it's permitted in one place, it will be demanded elsewhere. This is the Internet, after all.

Therefore:

1: Are such answers acceptable?

No. Answers should answer the question and stand alone without need for external knowledge. It's been minimally discussed over at Meta.SE, although in a slightly more acceptable form. See also "Placeholder Downvoting".

2: Are we gaining a reputation for closing too quickly?

Perhaps, perhaps not. The last time I can see that we discussed it, we didn't have the "on-hold" verbiage in place. My personal feeling is that closure is a good thing. Questions can always be re-opened. As much as encouraging site growth is a worthy goal, it's even more important to ensure that broken windows don't take over.

3: Should we be answering questions of dubious quality?

No. We should either be closing them or editing them into better shape and then answering them. (Or at a minimum ensuring that edits do occur sometime around the same time as the answer.) Something of this latter sort is even encouraged by our SE overlords, in the form of the new badges. (See ELL's pages for Explainer, Refiner, and Illuminator.)