Slightly different answers

Question

Am I'm the only one who noticed that some questions get multiple answers, however, some of the answers are the same, a subset of or have a slightly different nuance than another, older answer.

I was wondering if there ever was a way to answer questions in a collaborative fashion, in which one could add parts of his answer to the answer closest to his. I know that we have the comment section, but some people probably post their answers just for the sake of points, so in that case, perhaps the points can be divided by the the amount of collaborators.

Maybe, doing that could also solve the problem of "unanswered" questions, due to many good answers?

Or is this something that a moderator addresses when he sees it, for instance to lower the clutter of having x times the same answer?

Answer 1

I’ll split the question into two answer sections, since I feel that they are related but needs different answers.

Answer in collaborative fashion

There is always the possibility to mark an answer as community wiki. That way anyone can contribute to the answer, without restrictions. The problem is that community wikis doesn’t give reputation score to anyone, regardless of how many up-votes it gets. And since we rely on gamification here, community wikis are not very popular.

You can always contribute by editing an answer. But editing is not supposed to expand and answer with new content. You’re supposed to edit for fixing grammar or spelling issues first and foremost since some users here have limited English skills as it isn’t their native language (me included). Personally I feel proud if my answer gets edited. To me it means that someone felt that the answer was good enough to edit. One could also edit to fix links, revise images or adding formatting to code (not very common here though).

Solve the problem of unanswered questions

On UX.SE we have 97% answered questions which is a great score for a mature site like ours. A lot of the unanswered questions asks if there is a research on X, which is hard to answer No to. That’s why they are left without answers.

All this gives that there are limits to the software that we’re not able to solve. But in my opinion, the SE network is the leading question and answer forum on the web today, despite its limits.