I feel quite bad, I meant to self-answer two questions today but time got away from me

Yesterday I visited the "Shakespeare and Sons" bookshop in Prague, which contains mostly foreign language books including English, French, and others.

Ironic that just the previous day Gareth bumped my answer analysing Prague (where I'd never been before) as the setting for Kafka's The Trial.

@bobble that happens to all of us, so don't feel too bad

@mods do you want scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/266673/… ?

looks like it should be on-topic

Done!

And deleted the obsolete SFF-scope comments on this end :-)

@Randal'Thor good work

@Spagirl I've asked lots of questions where I already knew the answer before posting, but held back on self-answering to let others have a go. Sometimes, someone else's answer has taught me interesting stuff I didn't know, even if I was aware of the main fact that solved my question.

Admittedly, sometimes my thought process goes "let's let someone else have the rep for finding the answer", and here you and bobble are already high-rep users. But there's also an unfortunate tendency for some voters to look poorly on self-answered questions, so sometimes the best way to get the information out there is to ask the question and let someone else answer.

@Randal'Thor I haven't noticed self-answers putting people off tbh... however I've not looked either

@AncientSwordRage It's more of a thing on SFF (probably due to more ... people visibly highly motivated by rep ... there), but has also happened on Lit too.

@Randal'Thor very tactfully put

@Bookworm It is obvious that this question has gone HNQ.

@Bookworm It's not an exaggeration to say that this is also HNQ.

@Bookworm Not sure if it's worth suggesting M&TV for this now-deleted question. They've banned "ID this film/series" questions, but I don't know if they still allow strictly scoped questions like this about finding a quote/episode within a known series.

@Randal'Thor So did you gain new insights into Kafka from your visit then?

@Randal'Thor My personal preference is not to involve myself in questions where the OP knows the answer before i post, whether that's because they worked it out in the process of writing the question, knew from the outset and thought it was a good excercise for the site, or it already got answered in comments.

It isn't meant to be a criticism of anyone else's practice, though I was openly no fan of Hamlet's penchant for posting question and exhaustive answer simultaneously.

It's just my preference.

@Spagirl I'll continue not mentioning which questions of mine I know the answer to then ;-) Some of the answers I've learned more from have been yours.

@NapoleonWilson Unfortunately I didn't have enough time (nor a deep enough interest in Kafka to make time) to visit the Kafka museum.

@Randal'Thor @NapoleonWilson would "in which Poirot episode does he say this" be on-topic for M&TV, or does it count as an ID question for you?

@Randal'Thor Enough to make it off-topic.

Fair enough, thanks.

@Randal'Thor Well, did you have time and interest to indulge in Peter Parler's legacy?

@NapoleonWilson That name wasn't familiar to me, but yes, definitely.

Also Jan Šindel's.

> Poetry and song lyrics are so intensely personal to the writer that there's generally no point in attempting to guess what they mean.

With an answer like that, I suggested re-asking here rather than migrating :-)

@Randal'Thor on average self-answering leads to 60% more answers on a post: data.stackexchange.com/literature/query/1627458

Not sure if that's borne out at all numbers of answer though

As in, it may be that after a certain number of answers you don't get more by self answering first

@AncientSwordRage That's surely (mostly) explained by the fact that self-answered questions have at least one answer, whereas many non-self-answered questions have no answers

@GarethRees that could be it, but other sites don't see as pronounced an effect

Filtering to only non self answers with 1+ answer gives ~2:1.7 on sci-fi and ~1.4:1.6 on lit

Rene helped fix this: data.stackexchange.com/literature/query/1627483/…

1.3× more answers from the OP self answering where the question has 2+ answers

But on average 11× longer before the next answer after the first?

I'm guessing this is Cunningham's Law at work?

The OP posts a question and incorrect answer, and more than an average number of people jump in to correct them?

SFF has a lot less unanswered questions than Lit.

About 20% of Lit questions have zero answers, and of course none of those are self-answered.

There's probably some kind of Bayes theorem thing going on here.