Should we add a definition of a good answer to the tour?

Question

New users often post uncomplete/chatty answers. Here's a typical comment to such an answer:

Welcome to the site! Please take the tour when you get the chance. It's important to note that we're not a forum and we don't do discussion; if you post as an answer, you should directly answer the question that was asked.

However, the tour doesn't have a distinctive guide for answering. It is focused on asking questions:

Ask questions, get answers, no distractions

Ask about...

Don't ask about...

Should we add criteria for an acceptable answer to the tour? Or should we just send new posters to the help center instead of the tour?

Answer 1

We can't modify the tour that way without developer intervention.

Only three parts of the tour are editable by diamond moderators:

• The blurb at the top—we can change its text. That's the paragraph starting with “RPG Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for...”
• The example question shown in the first section can be swapped for any other.
• The on/off topic list can be edited. These are just bulleted lists like I'm writing now.

This information doesn't fit into any of those groups. The rest is baked in and can't be changed except by Stack Exchange developers specifically modifying the tour to enable us to make changes to that bit.

The example question at least demonstrates citation by example; it's part of why I configured it to that one specifically during my time as a diamond.

Answer 2

There is a help article dedicated to this, and we have our own guidance we can link.

How do I write a good answer?. Link this article if you feel the need to leave more detailed guidance about writing good answers that is not covered in the tour.

We also have our citation expectation meta that is even better and more specific than the help article. I prefer to leave a link to this.

Answer 3

The tour is only a basic introduction to the site

The tour gives a basic, high level introduction to the site. And it's hard to give an actually useful definition of what a good answer is, especially that fits into a place like the tour. That fits better into the help center, and for any aspects which aren't covered by the (non-editable) articles there, meta.

At risk of suggesting others just copy me, I usually link to both the tour and the help center. For convenience, note that [tour] and [help] are magic links to the tour and help center respectively. And if there are specific issues in a post, describing those (and linking to a help article or meta on the topic) are more useful in general.