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Some questions are asked about concrete situation at a moment of time. For example What has trump accomplished in his first term?.

As long as situation changes, answers may fade out.

Maybe such "dynamic" questions should be handled some other way?

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  • TBH I think they are just bad questions if the correct answer can be entirely different a year later. SE is just not intended for those kinds of Qs, given how voting, HNQ etc. work. No amount of tagging or bounty-ing is going to improve on that.
    – Fizz
    Aug 29, 2022 at 11:36
  • "What has trump accomplished in his first term?" isn't necessarily like that because the "first term" definitely ends at a point in time after which answers shouldn't depend on time. I think that Q is more likely to be a problem in terms of opinion-based answers and [in]completeness of the list. What one considers an accomplishment worth mentioning may be "in the eye of the beholder".
    – Fizz
    Aug 29, 2022 at 11:41
  • The answer tried to salvage the Q by relating what Trump did to what he had promised (during the campaign), but the Q itself wasn't [restricted] like that at all. Ultimately that Q was closed as duplicate of another, which was itself closed as POB.
    – Fizz
    Aug 29, 2022 at 11:44

2 Answers 2

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It worth noting that there's a post notice for these very questions:

This post relates to a rapidly changing event.

Only ♦ moderators can apply and remove these notices.

There are currently two questions on Politics Stack Exchange which have this notice:

You can find these with a SEDE query.

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  • On some sites in the network, you can flag posts you think deserve this notice for moderator attention. I hope the moderators here will read this and let us know if that works for them too.
    – Glorfindel
    Jun 18, 2020 at 8:43
  • This is a good notice to have (I assume you get added to a question by flagging it for moderator attention?), but how does it help us deal with answers that become out of date due to changing events?
    – divibisan
    Jun 18, 2020 at 19:09
  • @divibisan I guess that if moderators use it more often, we can use the SEDE query to check once in a while whether the answers are still up to date (and perhaps flag the post again if the notice isn't warranted anymore).
    – Glorfindel
    Jun 18, 2020 at 19:11
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I would suggest placing a bounty on the question with outdated answers. There is even an option for this on the bounty dialog:

enter image description here

In the specific case linked in this question, the original suggested duplicate question was closed for being opinion-based, so a bounty couldn't be started in this situation. However, as the community decided that the original was opinion-based, it seems likely that the new question will attract the same sentiment.

I would also point out that the only answer to the new question at the time of writing is just an updated version of the user's older answer to the proposed duplicate, which seems to reinforce the appropriateness of placing a bounty to encourage answers to be updated.

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  • 2
    That is a good approach, but sadly not available for everyone. Low reputation users may be unable to do so or lose privileges for it. So if they are interested in an up-to-date answer they will ask a new question.
    – miep
    Jun 18, 2020 at 9:14
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    @miep: Unfortunately, if everyone could draw attention to everything, then no one would be able to draw attention to anything.
    – Kevin
    Jun 21, 2020 at 21:03

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