In What to do when you get lost in a jazz song? judging from the timestamps and user both on the question and the answer, it looks like the question was asked, answered and marked as the answer all at the same time.
Is this legitimate practice? Even in cases when I know the answer, I usually hold off answering my own question until others have had a chance to respond. Am I being needlessly particular?
Yes. The system allows you to ask and answer the question at the same time. There's a check box before you submit your question that lets you answer it at the same time the question gets posted.
Sometimes it makes more sense to have the community answer a question you know to shed a different perspective on it and sometimes it's better to make the answer to your own question especially when you have a deep understanding of the topic and can ask and answer it at your own pace. I've immediately answered questions I've asked the same way, but I've also let the community answer questions that I asked that I hands down could answer.
Remember the goal of this site from the tour of the site:
With your help, we're working together to build a library of detailed answers to every question about music practice, performance, composition, technique, theory, or history.
Long term it doesn't matter if immediately you answer your own question or if you add an answer later or if you never post an answer to it as long as the question and answers help us build up quality content for our site.
One important thing to note is that the answer was not marked as Accepted for two weeks. Given that it has the most votes, I think it was a courteous amount of time to wait and absolutely appropriate to accept it.
It can occasionally be spammy or self-serving when users do this, but in this case it appears completely above-board and provides useful information. IIRC, the impetus for the question was someone looking for that information (or related) but they did so in a comment or with a more poorly-formed question.
I've just been prompted to answer my question. But I will not - as people should have a chance to look up and inform each other. It's not quite a teachers question. Anyway it might be better if I wait some days and give the information if others haven't answered.
