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The asker has declined this answer
Thread poster: Lancashireman
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Askers not always clueless Jul 19, 2011

To offer another perspective, it is not always true that "The asker is, by definition, the person who does not know the answer."

Just because a person asks a question does not make him entirely clueless. What if, for example, an answerer provides you with an obvious machine translation or a translation which simply does not work in the target language? What if the answerer totally ignores the context you have provided? What if you are a native speaker of the target language while th... See more
To offer another perspective, it is not always true that "The asker is, by definition, the person who does not know the answer."

Just because a person asks a question does not make him entirely clueless. What if, for example, an answerer provides you with an obvious machine translation or a translation which simply does not work in the target language? What if the answerer totally ignores the context you have provided? What if you are a native speaker of the target language while the answerer is a native speaker of your source language? What if the answerer insists on "guessing" on a question that requires specialized knowledge of a specific field?

There are many, many scenarios in which the asker can easily identify an answer that is wrong, misleading, or based on an obvious misreading of the text.

When I ask a question, I often already have some ideas swirling around in my head but might be seeking just the right nuance that hasn't occurred to me yet. Sometimes a term is totally new to me, but I won't just blindly accept a popular proposed answer. I will take the new information and use it to complete my research elsewhere.

To me, it actually makes more sense to be able to decline individual answers rather than be forced to decline all of them at once.

One should, however, be required to explain why a particular answer was declined.

Since we are not able to do this under the current system, the other option is to leave a note to the answerer explaining why we think his answer is not correct. The answerer can then respond and defend his point of view. ▲ Collapse
 
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The asker has declined this answer






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