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On Physics SE the best answer is selected by the community. That, IMO, means the answer with the most votes. It is the answer of most use to the community and hence to Physics SE going forward.
For that reason I think it is valid to make the most up-voted answer the one at the top of the list. By logical extension, the order of appearance should be vote ...
21
Well, we already have an against pinning to the top answer, so I'll do for pinning to the top.
I personally like the idea of having some control over the ordering of answers in my questions. I can imagine many scenarios where this is actually a good thing:
In general I would say that the person who asked the question is probably the one who is most likely ...
answered Sep 10 '21 at 6:49
AccidentalFourierTransform
45.1k1 gold badge14 silver badges34 bronze badges
21
It isn't compulsory to accept an answer. If you feel that neither answer is acceptable then do not accept either of them.
If you haven't received an answer that satisfies you then placing a bounty is the correct approach. It hasn't worked (so far) in this case, but that's the risk you run. It may simply be that none of the site members are experts in this ...
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Part of the problem is that we are not always sympathetic to questions from the less experienced physics fans. In this case the question had attracted two downvotes and no answers by the time I added my rather brief answer. So it's no surprise that when someone took time to write a detailed and apparently considered answer that answer would impress the OP ...
16
Accept the answer you find most helpful. It's your question, and the only criterion you need is how helpful you found the answer.
It's not uncommon that someone will post an answer then someone else will post with more details, which can give you a difficult choice of who to accept. But the same criterion applies - accept the answer you liked best.
You ...
13
Just to give some voice to the data: Nihar Karve created (and I helped refine) a SEDE query,
Questions with accepted answer pinned above highest scoring answer
which lists the threads affected by this potential change. Under the current dataset in SEDE, the change would affect 5505 threads, which seem to cover a decently thorough cross-section of the site'...
10
The user accepted your answer on Jan 1 at 22:15 (UK time), giving you +15 points, then today they changed their mind and unaccepted the answer so you got a -15 point reversal. Overall your net rep became just the +10 from the single upvote.
If you look in your reputation you'll see the -15 reversal is labelled unaccept.
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Personally I find the accepted answers to be more often helpful than the most upvoted question.
I think this is true often because the person who asked the question is often the person with the most interest in if the question is actually answered.
I think often wrong or not-fully-correct answers are upvoted because they seem right. Often answers that are ...
8
I don't have the time to go look at your answers, but this happens all of the time.
Sometimes posters of questions are here for a quick answer. Once they see something they like they don't up vote or choose an accepted answer, and often they are never seen again.
Other times it depends on time of activity. Some questions just don't get a lot of views. Some ...
7
Well, technically you're allowed to accept any answer to your question that you want, and to change which answer is accepted as often as the system allows you to.
If you want to be a "good Stack Exchange citizen", you should be reasonably sure that the answer you accept is correct. Sometimes there are multiple correct answers. Which one you choose to accept ...
7
I would personally suggest using the most upvoted answer, when compared to a negatively scored accepted answer.
That is because the "Accepted Answer" only reflects what the person asking the question thought was the best answer. On the other hand, votes provide you with information about how good the community thinks any given answer is. That's not to say ...
5
Your answer got unaccepted by OP.
5
If you feel like two (or more!) answers deserve recognition, but you have only one green checkmark, you could reward the others with a bounty.
5
I've looked through all your zero-score answers, and the thing that I noticed first of all was not the quality of your answers: instead it's the quality of the questions. Notice how a sizable portion of the questions (5 out of 11) either are now closed, or have zero score. These factors influence number of views, which is less than 50 for each of these ...
5
Note that one of the bounty
reasons is
Authoritative reference needed
Looking for an answer drawing from credible and/or official sources.
I've always interpreted such bounties as evidence that the bounty-setter believes the existing answers, even if upvoted, are fatally flawed. Offering such a bounty has the dual effect of (a) implying that the ...
4
I really don't think this is a good idea.
For starters, we already have a system established for determining which answers are good and bad. It's the voting system.
If wrong posts are gaining more votes than correct ones, that would be a community issue. I'm not sure why we as a community would be able to overwhelmingly decide that an answer is bad if it ...
4
In my mind, the most upvoted answer should appear at the top. If this is not the accepted answer, the accepted answer should come in second.
At worse, this will encourage users (including the OP) to reflect as to why the accepted answer is not the most upvoted in situations where this occurs.
4
It is monitored, sort of. The community tends to self-police (at least on other SE sites, I haven't seen it too often here but I could just be missing it). In other words, person A asks a question and somebody comes along and leaves a comment "Hey, I would like to answer your question but you have a history of leaving answers unaccepted. If you accept ...
4
Every post on our site requires a certain level expertise to evaluate. Sometimes that expertise is having completed primary school, sometimes it is having a dim recollection of high school physics, sometimes it is having studied a particular subfield of physics in depth. But you cannot understand any post about science if you do not share a basic framework ...
2
The answer which is "accepted" by the OP is merely that - the answer which the OP most approves of at the time. It is not intended to be the "best answer" and there is no guarantee that it is even "correct".
It is true that a random searcher might wrongly assume the "accepted" answer is "correct." But that is ...
2
No, this is not an acceptable way of dealing with the situation. Specifically, you shouldn't delete the original text of your answer.
The best thing to do, if you can, is to edit the answer to make it correct. Generally edits shouldn't substantially change what an answer is saying, but when the answer has been accepted you can take a bit more latitude to ...
1
Suggestion 1: Why not present the answers in a random order?
It seems to me that the arguments in favor of pinning to the top the accepted answer or the most upvoted answer are essentially a question of personal convenience - so that one does not have to look through all of the answers...
... but this is precisely the problem with the most upvoted answers: ...
1
Which answer should we accept if multiple answers address the question?
The one that you think is the best. How you decide that is up to you.
Should it be the one that was posted first (first come first served)?
Not unless you absolute can't decide which answer to pick.
Should it be the one that is the longest (cause the user put in more effort)?
...
1
I'm no specialist on what new-comers usually do and I can only speak for myself, but when I first came to this site, I was first magnetised by the list of highest voted answers and questions, not the lowest. Are you saying that there is a substantial percentage of highly-voted answers that are wrong ? Or are you saying that the community isn't engaging ...
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible