Structure of a question: Giving your own calculations as an answer or including them in the question?

Question

Recently, I asked this question and included my own calculations in the question description. Now I wanted to ask a follow-up question with a similar aim and have some calculations that might be sufficient - just as in the original question.

I am not happy how the original question turned out. It feels kind of off to answer the question within the question and then just ask "Am I correct?".

Would it be better form to answer my own questions with the calculations I have and thus give other people a more independent approach to answer the question?

I have read a few meta posts on self-answering, but I didn't feel they helped me decide in this situation.

It is not a matter of preference for me, just structure and form. I do see the self-answering could be perceived as "fishing for upvotes" or something. The goal still is getting the best possible answer - if that is mine (which might be) then that is fine. If I missed a few points and someone adds them in theirs then I'll take theirs, obviously.

EDIT:

I posted my question in the sandbox. Sorry it took a while, but I didn't get to finish it yesterday.

Answer 1

The most important thing to remember when self-answering a question is that either the question or the answer must be able to stand on its own regardless of who posted either.

In other words, you don't get cut any slack because it's your own question. (For some people, it's the opposite. There isn't supposed to be any difference because it's a self-answer, but to the extent that there is, I more often see self-answers being judged more harshly rather than less so.)

Basically:

• Does the question contain all the information needed to provide an answer? If no, then add the required information to the question. People looking to answer the question shouldn't need to read any existing answers (though doing so is often good form, to make sure you aren't repeating points already made in existing answers).
• Does the answer actually provide an answer to the question that is being asked? If no, then it's not an answer, but rather something else, possibly a clarification or follow-up to the question, and doesn't belong as an answer.

Answer 2

I do see the self-answering could be perceived as "fishing for upvotes" or something.

In general that is not the case. Quite the opposite: the goal of StackExchange is to share knowledge, so if you decide to share your knowledge by posting a question that you had and the answer you reached than that is very much how StackExchange is supposed to work and you deserve every single upvote you get from it. This is not fishing - this is simply contributing.

Whether you want to do that is a different thing. Basically there are different forms of asking a question. The first one is the reality-check style: you post a question and state what you think should happen with something like "Does this make sense the way I have described my world?" at the end. The second style is to choose self-answering.

Personally I'd say that you should self-answering if you feel that you had a problem and researched it, arriving at a conclusion that you think could be satisfactory for people that might have a similar problem in the future. They ask the same question as you did and you found an answer, so why not share the knowledge?

If you are less sure that you have found a solution that actually works for your situation you should probably choose the reality-check style and state the current state of your research in your question. Basically this is a kind of question like: "I have this problem. This is what I researched. My conclusion currently is that. But I feel there is something missing, for example X and Y do not seem ideal. What did I overlook?"

But in the end this is a judgement call and you are the only one who can really decide how you want to do this. If you would like some feedback on how the question is phrased you can check out our Sandbox once you have a draft, but ultimately it's up to you to decide what to do. There are no hard rules about self-answering, so if you feel that it might be for example a nice experiment after your last question did not work out the way you thought it would work out I'd say just go for it and self-answer your next question to see where it takes you. Some people like the "Is this correct?" style, while others prefer to focus on "Questions and answers" as the core of the site.

Ideally other people should answer similar in both cases. In one case they would have to say "Yes, this works, you are right on X, Y and Z. / No, this works not because X, Y and Z.", while in the other case they just elaborate on "X, Y and Z."