1

Yesterday, I came across this answer. It was answering the Terraria question 'Can Rocket Boots be found in chests?'.

Picture of post

Yep. That's right. It is a list so long that my browser can only just zoom out enough to see it all.

Let me give you a brief summary of the question, the answer, and the problems with that answer.

Question:

  • OP has not yet gotten rocket boots and is trying to get some
  • Has looked at wikis and had no luck
  • OP wants a confirmation as to whether rocket boots can be found in chests

Answer

  • Community Wiki post, 14 revisions by 3 users

  • Is extremely outdated and all the wiki links are broken (Standard practice is to downvote for outdated post and update the links)

  • Has only one sentence directly related to the question

    No, the Rocket Boots can not be found in any chests, don't drop from shadow orbs or bosses...

  • Has an extremely long list listing nearly every single item that drops from something or can be found in something (which is nearly every item in the game at the time of answering).

  • This list was not asked for and is not directly related to the question

  • This meta post states that we should not include incredibly long posts if they are not asked for, however it does not state what we should do about existing ones.

So, the big question: What should we do with this post? I can come up with four main ideas:

  1. leave it as-is, 3 people put lots of work into this at the time and their work should not be wasted
  2. edit to summarise each part of the list with links to relevant wiki pages
  3. edit the entire list out
  4. delete the post

I am personally leaning towards options 3 and 4.

6
  • 2
    The list isn't relevant to the question that is being asked, and as you say most of the image/wiki links are broken. I'd delete the whole lot and just leave the top sentence which actually answers the question.
    – Robotnik Mod
    Commented Oct 12, 2015 at 7:36
  • 1
    Standard practice with broken, fixable links is fixing them.
    – Arperum
    Commented Oct 12, 2015 at 7:37
  • @Arperum That was left over from before I added the broken links to that dotpint. Fixing that now.
    – angussidney
    Commented Oct 12, 2015 at 7:37
  • I agree with @Robotnik though, all the links are irrelevant.
    – Arperum
    Commented Oct 12, 2015 at 7:38
  • ever heard of scrolling screenshots or multiple screenshots?
    – Aequitas
    Commented Oct 15, 2015 at 0:59
  • @Aequitas multiple screenshots yes, scrolling screenshots no. Searching that up now.
    – angussidney
    Commented Oct 15, 2015 at 5:22

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
3

I believe we should edit the entire list out of this answer and just leave the first sentence.

As it stands, the list is not relevant to the question. It does not answer the question, and it was not asked for in the question. It is also pretty useless as all the links are broken.

The first sentence, however, does answer the question directly. While it might be outdated, it is still of use to the OP. Therefore the answer should not be deleted.

So, overall, I suggest that we just remove the list, and add a little note saying that it is outdated.

10
  • 4
    Oh, come on! What on Terraria are you stranded people doing these days?! That list that was edited out is absolutely relevant, it is an independent confirmation of whether or not it is dropped somewhere as requested by the OP in the last paragraph of his/her question. Yes, OP asks proof, only my answer provided that before it was edited. The answer obtained 22 upvotes and this bothers you just now because you didn't mind to actually read the question and saw a long post? The idea of the Stack Exchange network's guidelines is to add proof, not remove it; you're doing it wrong...
    – Tamara Wijsman
    Commented Oct 12, 2015 at 23:06
  • 6
    @Tom The list is outdated by two major updates. A cursory glance at the wiki shows that the list is incomplete and obviously superceded by a superior source. Leaving incorrect information on this site where it is already recorded better elsewhere is actively harmful to anybody coming across this information now
    – Private Pansy
    Commented Oct 13, 2015 at 4:11
  • 2
    @TomWijsman I'll admit proving a negative is difficult, but I don't think the way to go about it in this case was to list every other single thing ever. While I don't know about the state of the game's wikis at the time of answering, a link to the page with rocketboots and outlining how that page explains where/how to obtain them, and a link (many links?) to page(s) about chest loot would have been sufficient to demonstrate the question's assertion that they might be found in chests is false. Listing every single piece of loot in the game was superfluous.
    – Trent Hawkins
    Commented Oct 13, 2015 at 4:28
  • 1
    @TomWijsman the fact that other things drop other things doesn't mean something else doesn't drop other things. It's as effective a proof as just saying that rocketboots aren't dropped from anything. How does saying x drops y prove that x doesn't also drop rocketboots?
    – Aequitas
    Commented Oct 13, 2015 at 4:52
  • 1
    @TomWijsman Yes, I appreciate the effort. That is the only thing that stopped me from editing the whole thing out instantly. However, as Trent said, just some links to the rocket boots page and the various chest pages would have completed the job much better. I tried doing this before I made this post, but because of the number of chests in the 1.3 update it was taking forever.
    – angussidney
    Commented Oct 13, 2015 at 5:40
  • 1
    @Aequitas: An enumeration of the items from the source code is proof.
    – Tamara Wijsman
    Commented Oct 15, 2015 at 0:19
  • 1
    @angussidney: Haha, yeah! Just getting a message across to avoid future lazy mistakes, don't really mind this removal. Just saying it's too easy to fall into a habit of "oh, this looks long, I'll just shorten or remove it" and "this is outdated, I'm lazy, I'll just remove instead of correcting it" when doing too much meta stuff...
    – Tamara Wijsman
    Commented Oct 15, 2015 at 0:22
  • @PrivatePansy +1 agreed, not saying that it's not a problem.
    – Tamara Wijsman
    Commented Oct 15, 2015 at 0:24
  • @TomWijsman no it's not, if I write a list of 100 items that can be found in chests, that doesn't prove at all that no other items spawn in the chests. The fact that an item doesn't spawn in chests shows it. You could've just said "source code of chests shows that x is not included in the list of possible items it can spawn with" you could have an image of a search of the class returning no results if you wanted to illustrate it more clearly.
    – Aequitas
    Commented Oct 15, 2015 at 0:58
  • 1
    @Aequitas: An enumeration proves it just as well and is more illustrative. You're just negating the proof...
    – Tamara Wijsman
    Commented Oct 15, 2015 at 16:01
-3

I've already gone ahead and edited out the list and referenced your meta post as a point of reference should editors want to understand the reason behind the change. I fully agree with your assertion that the rest of the answer is fully irrelevant to the question being asked.

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .