What is the stance on users who answer their own questions, very fast?

Question

The last few days I have come across a couple of questions of the same user that follow this pattern:

Q - I would like to own / buy / keep / how to take care this pet.

A - (quite soon after posting question) lengthy answer to own question.

Now, I think it's good to have active users, and this user does post what seem to be questions that he / she needs answered. But answering your own questions kind of defeats this site's format. And gives an bad impression to the users's intentions.

What is the stance here on Pets on this?

Answer 1

It's acceptable and even encouraged.
There's a box in the UI to self answer at the time of posting the question.

Can I answer my own question?

Yes! Stack Exchange has always explicitly encouraged users to answer their own questions. If you have a question that you already know the answer to, and you would like to document that knowledge in public so that others (including yourself) can find it later, it's perfectly okay to ask and answer your own question on a Stack Exchange site.

To encourage people to do this, there is a checkbox at the bottom of the page every time you ask a question. If you have more than 15 reputation and already know the answer, click the checkbox that says "Answer your own question" at the bottom of the Ask Question page. Type in your answer, then submit both question and answer together.

Alternatively, you may go back and add an answer to your own question at any time.

You can also accept your own answer, but you must wait 48 hours to do so. After all, someone else may come along with an even better solution to your problem!

Answer 2

It's a good thing!

The site's goal is to build a usable, accessible knowledge base that will be of use to future users.

Most of the time you'll find that users who 'self answer' have been unable to find the answer to their question and, through some research, have determined the solution to their own problem. If you want to share the answer that you've found then there has to be a question on the site. If there isn't an existing one, you'll need to create one which is often how self answers turn up.

Check out this canonical meta post that explains it more eloquently than I can.

To address your second point about length answers:

It is about quality not quantity. Just because the answer is long doesn't mean that it is good. If you think you can provide a better answer then I would encourage you to provide it. A clear, succinct answer can sometimes be much better than an essay!

Remember that if you feel the question or answer are not useful, you can downvote the post. Voting is important and a key tenent of our site's structure.

Summary

If both the questions and answer are consistently good, there is nothing to worry about. It's a great way to gain rep too.

• If the questions or answers are falling below your personal standard, vote accordingly.
• Consider providing your own answer to questions, even when they already have an answer by the OP, if you feel you could write a better one.
• If the questions or answers are falling below the standard we expect on the site, flag accordingly.