As a Stack Exchange site, answers on RPG.SE are expected to be cited and backed up, but what the expectations are exactly can be hard to find.
What are the citation expectations of answers on here?
Stack Exchange is a rigorous Q&A community with a mission to build up a reliable knowledge base for future readers. It's sort of like Wikipedia in that regard. To accomplish this mission we need our answers to be clearly backed up so visitors can verify our answers for themselves. Without any citation we are just random people on the internet and our words are worth only so much without any supporting evidence, regardless of what our reputation or standing is inside the community.
You do not need to cite every sentence, but citation of various statements and positions may be expected and requested by your fellow community members.
Some questions are asking for objective or mostly objective answers; others are asking more subjectively for people's experience doing things like running games. Depending on these, your answer will need objective and/or subjective backup.
Not all subjective questions are a fit for the site. Remember, the help center says:
What kind of questions should I not ask here?
Avoid asking questions that are subjective, argumentative, or require extended discussion. This is not a discussion board, this is a place for questions that can be answered!
This means questions that are just debates, discussions, or opinions get closed. However we are not just “RPG Rules Stack Exchange”: there is a lot of value in being able to ask and answer questions that involve more of an element of judgement in them—as long as we can do so constructively.
Therefore, we have expectations about answers and statements in those answers requiring proof to be constructive, “hard” proof for objective elements and documented experience for subjective elements.
Useful answers will always be one or both of these categories.
These are pretty much just like Wikipedia: cite your sources. If you are bringing up the game rules, cite the rule with a book and page number or a link to an online representation, and possibly a brief quote, to demonstrate that the rules are what you say they are. If you are suggesting a developer said something in a tweet, link and quote the tweet. If you're citing mathematics, it's best to reproduce your work or cite your sources. If you suggest that something in the game is intended to work or be interpreted in a certain way, cite where a developer or design document said that. Use a citation style of your preference.
Not every claim you make will need citation. Many things we might say are common sense or common knowledge and nobody will request a citation for them. For many things, however, nobody should have to take our word for it that what's being said is true; we need to show it is. If someone requests citation it's probably needed—revise your post to add that citation.
Citing your sources has the added benefit that newer players can go back to the source you provided and learn more about that area of the game.
People ask about mechanics because they're trying to better understand the game and how it works. Anyone can make a ruling, but that includes the person who asked the question, so we're not looking for this content. You should answer with how the game affirmatively handles the situation based on its text and cite the game's text to back up your statements.
These are answers drawing on experience to suggest solutions to social problems, best practices, GM and player techniques, etc. Our foundational rule is that these answers must follow the Back It Up! principle found in Good Subjective, Bad Subjective:
Back It Up! means that your answers must be based on either:
- Something that happened to you personally
- Something you can back up with a reference
This means when you provide a subjective solution you believe will resolve the situation, we expect that you cite analogous experience of how it has worked out in actual practice — your own experience or someone else's. Describing how it worked out is more preferable to describing how well it worked out: “these things happened, the players felt this way about it” is preferable to “it worked well”, but either is preferable to no citation of it actually being tried at all.
The experience does not have to be of the exact same situation, although that would be ideal. Experience of similar or analogous situations is also relevant and helpful, at least to the extent they are similar/analogous enough to be relevant.
Any of us can say “here's what I'd do” based on no actual experience, or come up with something on the spot as an off-the-cuff idea, but our site is not looking for this content. We want to collect tried-and-tested solutions with well-understood outcomes. We don't want your opinion; we want your expertise. If you do not have experiences you can bring to the table in that particular case, do not answer the question. Answers not doing so may be downvoted and/or deleted. Untested homebrew is to be avoided.
This doesn't mean that you should avoid indicating where personal preference comes into an answer! An answer explaining "I do this because X, but I've seen others do this other thing because Y, and both work" can provide an excellent overview of a wide yet deceptively narrow topic.
Nevertheless, answering “How do I handle this issue” with a recommendation to do this, that, and the other without any experience doing it yourself, or having seen it done, or having anything other than “it sounds good in my head” to believe it would help the querent, makes our site worse.
To apply the Good Subjective, Bad Subjective's guidance on questions to answers as well, a good subjective answer should tend to: