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Seeing +15/-0 consensus on Should we have SR-style quality guidelines for questions and answers?, I would say it's time to figure out what we require in answers.

What is required for an answer to be 'high quality'? What do we do with answers that aren't high quality?

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Copied from https://softwarerecs.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/356/what-is-required-for-an-answer-to-be-high-quality with major changes for Hardware Recommendations.


People answering questions in a manner that is extremely low quality and not very useful for future visitors would be the downfall of this site. These sort of answers can be broken down as follows:

  • Link only answers
  • "I Googled your query and found this" answers
  • Answers that do not explain how their recommendation meets the requirements in the question

The purpose of this meta post is to come to a clear community agreed consensus on what constitutes an acceptable answer, that can be linked to in future when asking somebody who has answered a question to improve the quality of their content.

Like questions, high quality hardware recommendations (answers) should follow guidelines on both formatting/presentation and content.

Content

Be verbose.

The asker has provided a list of requirements that the hardware must fulfill. It is the responsibility of the answerer to provide details on how their recommendation fulfills these requirements. Use pictures if the asker has asked for specific physical characteristics or specific user interfaces.

Answers must be able to stand completely on their own. This means that linking to a product on an external website without providing commentary and details about that product will likely be grounds for removal of the answer. Specifically, always include the full name of the product and all relevant specifications in your answer.

Formatting

Formatting is important, try to mirror the formatting in the question in your answer. The asker should have listed their requirements in a list, use their same list in the same order if you can when detailing why your recommendation meets their requirements.

Make sure that points you feel are important are properly emphasized to aid readability and draw the asker's attention to the points you're making.

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