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Requesting a site specific post notice as suggested by Robert Cartaino in the Pets meta post Consider carefully if story-sharing anecdotes are REALLY acceptable answers

Thank you sharing that story with us, but we're hoping for a bit more than an interesting anecdote. These type of stories don't always apply to the broader case, and it doesn't really answer the question in an objective way. Do you have anything more to back this up?

Per this SE.Meta these can be added as a feature request.

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  • Seconded, this would be handy when the response could be made better as opposed to just converting to a comment.
    – Joanne C
    Commented Jul 13, 2014 at 23:13
  • Definitely would help with a lot of the first posts we get
    – Zaralynda
    Commented Jul 14, 2014 at 0:14
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    It's also worth noting that this site strongly lends itself to anecdotal answering because of the nature of the questions that tend to arise.
    – Joanne C
    Commented Jul 14, 2014 at 12:51

1 Answer 1

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I'm going to add this, with a slight variation on the wording. Let's take a second, though, and talk about when we're going to use these - it could be a great tool but is also easily overused.

When you find a post that:

  • Someone has obviously put a good bit of time and effort into writing
  • Could be a well balanced answer if authoritative sources could be woven into it

.. then it's a good candidate for this notice. What I'd like to accomplish with it is something much warmer and more welcoming than the usual [citation-needed], for folks that enjoy typing coherent and interesting things into our text boxes.

If it's not a great post to begin with, a comment followed by deletion should definitely be the route you take - don't polish up broken ornaments to hang back on the tree.

To that, I'll spend a bit of time tomorrow coming up with a little gentler text, post it here for vetting, and get it in place.

Update: The Text

Thank you for sharing your experience! Pets Stack Exchange answers require more context than an interesting anecdote alone can provide; this story-based answer really needs some authoritative references to support it. Please add links to help support the experience you're describing, or this answer might eventually be removed.

I think this does a good job of (1) being nice and welcoming, (2) invites more than just the author of the post to provide some editorial love and (3) doesn't hang a badge of shame on a contribution, but implies that some degree of haste for improvement needs to happen.

I'll put this in at some point today, barring any objections and taking into account any additional suggestions between now and then.

This is now done - your moderators can apply it like they would any other post notice, I've named it "anecdotal needs references".

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