How to deal with a significant substantive error in an otherwise good answer by an absentee answerer?

Question

ScotM was an active (and top-notch) participant at this site for about seven months (December 2014–July 2015), but he last answered a question at EL&U on July 20, 2015, and his profile lists him as "Last seen Jan 10 '16 at 8:27."

The problem I want to resolve involves his answer to Etymology of "cut someone some slack", which he posted on February 1, 2015, and edited on February 6 of that year. Somehow, in looking for an early instance of the expression "cut [someone] slack," he fell into a Google Books glitch-trap and repeated its erroneous attribution of a quotation that included the phrase "cut slack for others' dumb opinions" to Frederick Douglass's My Bondage and My Freedom (1855). In fact, the quotation comes from a novel published in 2001. The earliest published instance of "cut [someone] some slack" that I know of is from 1968—113 years later than My Bondage and My Freedom.

Three months ago, I added a comment to ScotM's answer, pointing out the error and suggesting an edit that would remove the mistake and leave the rest of his otherwise very good answer intact—but he's not around to make the change. Meanwhile, casual readers who visit the page in question (it has racked up 10,616 page views so far) are going to come away with a seriously mistaken view of how old the expression is and where it came from, unless they read through ScotM's long answer and my comment at the end of it and my long answer (which follows his).

At this point, should I just take matters into my own hands and delete the first 92 words of ScotM's answer? Or is it better to leave things as they are and hope that ScotM will eventually revisit the site and correct the unfortunate error at the beginning of his answer?

Answer 1

I would say that taking matters into your own hands is appropriate at this point. You found a factual error (and have attributions to back it up), you notified the original author, you gave them plenty of time and opportunity to incorporate the suggested change. Since they have not been available, doing it for them now seems like 'the neighborly thing to do'; a little clean-up and improvement that should be welcomed if and when they come back to find it.

Answer 2

Rather than remove the quotation entirely, it might be better to properly attribute it. Although the correct citation is much more recent than Frederick Douglass, it still provides reasonable orientation for the reader in the sense that it suggests "that cut slack for [me] is compressed into cut [me] slack".

Answer 3

I suggest cutting him some slack. :)

Just add a editorial one-liner at the top of his answer, saying that the Google Books citation was a red herring, but that it doesn't affect the force of the answer.

This is based on the answer's assertions that starting point of the etymological trail isn't very visible:

• In Douglas's usage, cut slack seems to be used as a metaphorical set phrase, but the literal underpinning of the expression is not obvious.

• There is no conclusive evidence establishing any of these scenarios as the etymological source for Cut me some slack.

If the rest of the answer is solid, I don't mind the admission of conjecture about the start the trail. Since conjecture has been admitted anyway, it doesn't hurt too much that the opening example serves only as motivation for the rest.

Answer 4

This is a bit of a delicate problem.

Leaving the post in its current state violates the policies regarding attribution, and being aware of the problem obliges us to fix it not only as a matter of policy but also ethical duty to the author of the quotation. Deleting that portion of the post would change the meaning of the post which violates editing guidelines, and cause the answer to unravel as it acts to introduce and justify the relevant dictionary definitions. Changing the quotation has a similar effect to deleting it, unless we are 100% certain that Scot would analyze the replacement quotation identically, which would probably require his co-operation. If we could get his co-operation, it would be clear that we should insist that he should edit the answer to fix the problem in a way that he sees fit. I imagine that he would be more than willing to fix the problem if he knew about it and was able. Deleting the an otherwise meritorious post due to a slight mistake made by the original poster seems like too severe of a course of action to take.

Thankfully, I think there is a good compromise between deletion of the segment and maintaining the original intent which does not require us to delete the whole answer. Stack Exchange has a few fancy hypertext markup language tags, so we can strikethrough the incorrect text and leave [an editorial note in brackets]. The note should state that his original attribution was wrong, and properly attribute the original source. Surely these tags were intended to serve some sort of purpose, and I think this is an instance where they may come in useful. Since the way he originally presented the answer would still be visible, the meaning of it would remain intact while making it evident that something is wrong with it.

This is not a perfect solution. Aesthetically the amount of text that needs to be stricken out is large, and the editorial note interrupts the flow of the post. It also draws attention to the fact that the quotation was misattributed, and is not as useful of a resource as ScotM originally thought it was, which may lead to a few votes against an otherwise merituitous answer.

However, I would like to reitterate that this is probably the best compromise we have got in terms of satisfying all relevant policy, short of deleting the answer altogether, and I can't say some votes against an answer that did not perform the requisite fact checking are unmerited, especially given that many people are probably already under the impression that it was a 19th century quote, instead of a 21st century quote. We should also note that the probable cause of the error to mitigate against the effect to prevent the effect from being too severe.

Answer 5

It's a great shame, the amount of work and research ScotM did was admirable. The answer is extremely well written, and I liked the cooperage theory, it at least explained what the slack in "cut me some slack" could have referred to.

The answer has been unaccepted and the upvote retracted because the entire post hinged on that single citation dated 1855, I hadn't realize at the time, I was enamoured by the care and originality that ScotM had taken into crafting his answer.

I'm really sorry, and if it had been me I would now be banging my head on the desktop, beating my chest, tearing out my hair and trying frantically to find another 19th century, or early 20th century citation. But the answer is not mine, and I don't think anyone can repair the crack.

In my opinion until its author returns, the answer is irreparable.

Perhaps it should be deleted.

EDIT
It is unfair to downvote an answer when its author is not available to rectify the error, and even more so when the ‘error’ originally lies with Google Books.

UPDATE

The inside cover says that My Bondage and my Freedom was originally printed in 1855. So That's one piece of the mystery cleared up. But I cannot find the term slack cited anywhere in the 2008 reprint, nor in the 2001 novel The Hauntings of Hood Canal, which contains the citation, according to Sven post.