I've noticed that, lately, we have gotten a few essentially one-line answers of the form "Look at <insert link>
, where good details are provided."
I am wondering what, if anything, should be done to address such answers. For example, do we
- Let the voting mechanism handle them,
- Address them in the FAQ,
- Actively manage and discourage such answers, or
- Do nothing (because I'm completely off-base here)?
My reason for asking is as follows.
While, certainly there are many outstanding internet resources that provide better information than could be detailed in a short stats.SE post, it seems to me that the ephemeral nature of much of the web means that a lot of these answers (which may be highly upvoted and/or accepted) may turn out to be essentially useless in the future if the link gets broken. If the goal of stats.SE is to provide a centralized community for addressing statistical problems, then it seems incumbent on us to ensure that the content is as stable as possible.
My inclination would be to actively discourage such answers and suggest that an appropriate synopsis be placed in the body of the post with a link to the (potentially unstable) source. Likewise, for links to peer-reviewed references, answerers should be strongly encouraged to use stable links, as can be found on sites like projecteuclid.org and other online repositories.
What do other community members think?