Is it better to have one answer that covers everything, or multiple answers that are a bit different?

Question

Watching the site grow on Area 51, our visits per day and the number of questions asked per day are rising steadily. But what I've noticed one number that doesn't change is the answer ratio (It's consistently at 1.6).

One reason I think is that most everyone tends to stick to certain questions that they answer, and our core userbase isn't big enough to have much overlap. So we simply need more users who answer questions to get more answers on each question.

But I think part of the reason is that as soon as an answer is posted, we all comment on it to have that person add to it until it's a single answer that contains everything. This tends to work well unless the topic is pretty open to differing opinions I think.

I kind of like that method, because it builds a good, solid answer that is approved by multiple people. It's problematic though because looking back at the answers, after the comments are all deleted, it just seems like the question is ignored once there's an answer posted.

As nice as it is to have one answer that covers everything, should we be focusing more on writing alternate answers instead?

Answer 1

Multiple answers is much better.

_{Short as a comment, but posted as an answer, because I feel so strongly in favor of multiple answers.}

Answer 2

Where I can add an answer that adds to what someone else has already said, I will. I think others are following the same technique, since most of the questions I've answered have other answers.

I don't think we need to be overly concerned at this point: this is the kind of topic that tends to get a relatively small number of definitive answers as opposed to a whole lot of different possible correct answers (like, as JoshDM says, Stack Overflow, which gets so much activity it's almost impossible to follow unless you're actively filtering to the tags/topics that interest you).

(I'm pretty active in the sqa stack exchange site, and that's been in Beta for several years now - it's another topic that tends to lean towards smaller numbers of answers as well as relatively few questions)

Answer 3

Well, here's the thing: some of these solo answers are way comprehensive, and it's quite tough to add a second one.

Our options are to either say, "well, that's the way it is" or strategically target questions with less than 3 answers and add an answer if we haven't already (or, I guess, a second answer if you've already answered it once).

Granted, this isn't StackOverflow where there are 4^7 different programmatic solutions to concatenating Strings and everyone wants their say, so we do have that to consider.

Follow-up questions for thought:

• Should this be brought to the forefront with the go-live evaluation committee?
• Or is it something they've already taken into consideration?
• Are the Area51 stats unrealistic for a site like this?
• Is this possibly an aspect of having a small user group and the situation will remedy itself with the recently obvious growth?

That being said, I'm actively following the "add an answer" tactic; here are four results of that recent effort:

• When walking my dog at night, how can I improve his visibility to others? (added answer)
• Preparing a dog to stay alone without crating
• From where can I purchase a pet white mouse? (this one was more like "retain and edit your answer" than "add an answer")
• How do I get my dog to use the doggie door in both directions?