What's the criteria for accepting an answer?

Question

On sites like StackOverflow it's pretty cut and dry, if someone's answer fixes your problem, you mark it as correct.

Here, however, it's a much different story. Should you mark the correct answer if you used their advice? What if it ends up not working months later when you actually taste your beer/wine/cider/etc? Should you wait until your brew is finished to prove out the suggested answer? Then you risk forgetting to go accept it.

My first reaction is that these types of questions should be wiki's, but then 80% of the site would be wiki questions (not to mention I don't see a place you can make a question a wiki, even if you wanted to). What are we to do?

Answer 1

The "accepted answer" function was never intended to mark an answer as "correct." It is simply the original author's selection of the answer they found most helpful. The accepted answer is not gospel. Your instinct is correct: select the answer you found most helpful. If you later find that it was wrong, you can select another answer.

As for community wiki, no it was not really intended to shield questions without "cut and dry" answers. Asking good, subjective questions is a whole different topic covered here: Good Subjective, Bad Subjective.

Because of the confusion of community wiki, setting a question as such was deprecated. That that's why the wiki check box is missing (but you can still mark answers as community wiki, if you so choose).

Answer 2

Regarding the criteria for accepting an answer, it's whatever the asker wants. We have no way to enforce whatever we think are the 'correct' criteria for asking questions, so there's not much point in deciding what's correct in the first place.

Regarding community wiki, that was disabled as an option a while back across StackExchange. Only moderators can mark things as such, and it's not simply for subjective questions.