Now that the 5e DMG is released, what is the best approach to revisit existing questions?

Question

There are a great many questions about the 5th edition of D&D that were asked prior to the release of all of the core books. Some of those questions are now outdated, since additional detail is available in the DMG.

For better or worse, these outdated questions have accepted answers. As a result, it can be challenging for an updated, accurate answer to rise to the top in votes and replace the accepted answer.

So what is the preferred approach for reconsidering such questions? Is it a good choice to post a near-duplicate question, such as "Now that the core books are released, original question here" or is it better to respond to the original question and hope that the updated answer eventually trickles up to get some attention?

Is there a tag that could be applied to questions where the accepted answer states "We'll know more after the DMG is released" so the community can more easily identify questions that may need to be revisited? Perhaps dnd-5e-basic?

Edit:

As a concrete example, consider this excellently-answered question: Does a single PC who is stealthy get to surprise monsters when the rest of the group is not?

The answer is well-authored, clear, concise, and helpful. It is probably the case that this answer is still correct. Its only fault is that it predates the core books, so the viewer cannot be confident that it is correct in 5th-edition as currently written. The answer would be more useful to current audiences if it were updated with the appropriate page numbers and citations from the PHB and DMG rather than the starter kit.

I would hesitate to post my own solution, as it would be merely a restatement of the already-excellent-and-accepted answer with updated page numbers and whatnot. While I currently lack the reputation on this Exchange to edit answers, I would still hesitate to do so, as changing the page numbers and updating the citation text as necessary is, in my opinion, too substantial a change to be made in the pure editorial sense outside of a community wiki.

Answer 1

Our fixing of old Next questions has not been working that well. With some hindsight, I'm going to propose something that may be conceptually unpopular, but may be very effective:

Let natural duplicates happen as they're asked, and close the old question as duplicates of the new questions.

There have been several old Next questions that later 5e questions are duplicates of, but the old questions are either hard to revise to make current or the answers are a mess of speculation, "We'll see when the DMG comes out", and a tangle of irrelevant rules that aren't part of the final D&D 5e rules. Fixing these to make them palatable targets for closing as duplicate is hard work; getting attention for new answers is hard and not very effective; getting people to update their answers is tough. Bounties have just not been effective in this case, based on observation.

Meanwhile, we're shutting down nice, clean, current questions from people with an honest problem. Rather than push a boulder uphill trying to fix the old Next questions, why shouldn't we take advantage of the clean questions that people are giving us for free?

I know, I know, duplicating old questions to new questions is getting it backwards. Except it's not! That's actually what we're supposed to be doing:

If the new question is a better question or has better answers, then vote to close the old one as a duplicate of the new one. — Shog ♦

So I say we stop shutting down new 5e questions when they're nicer than the old Next questions, and then close the old ones as duplicates of the new ones. If someone really wants old playtest question information, they can go digging for it using timestamp searches because they're still there. But the more common case of people wanting current 5e information will more easily find our current questions if the duplicates are pointing forward, when there's a significant quality difference.

Our job is curating the best, after all. Duplicating forward toward good questions is an effortless way to fix our old bad D&D Next questions and ensure we're curating the best.

Answer 2

Do not duplicate. Go post new answers, those question will rise to the front page, and good new answers will be upvoted. Ideally the OPs will be around to accept new answers, but if not, the highest voted vs accepted is a well understood distinction.

Propose edits to the existing answer if the changes are pro forma or minor.

Add a comment if the existing answer has become plain ol' wrong based on later information.

Answer 3

If you see a question that you feel needs an update, you have two, not mutually exclusive, options:

1. Answer it yourself

   The question will be bumped up to the main page, and ideally many people will see it, check out your answer and upvote it.

2. Place a Bounty on it

   Bounties are Stack Exchange's solution to really getting peoples attention to a question. In fact, one of the listed bounty reasons is:

   Current answers are outdated

   The current answer(s) are out-of-date and require revision given recent changes.

   Setting a bounty will not only put the question on the front page, but it will be listed as "featured" for 7 days, and carry a high-contrast blue thingy next to the title. It will also state directly why this question needs attention, and more visibly than a comment or new answer could state it.

In fact, if you opted for variant 1, someone else might come along and bump it up further by setting a bounty himself.