What's the community position on questions that request "one reponse per answer"?

Question

This evening I answered a couple of questions:

What are the reasons for and against wearing a bicycle helmet?

Charities that accept bike donations

Bicycling apps for Android

Each of these questions had a request along the lines of "One response per answer please..."

It seems like this is a workaround to create something similar to a poll. For one of the questions it didn't seem like a big deal, but for the question about "Reasons For/Against Helmet Use" it seems like asking for one reason per answer and then having those reasons voted up or down seems contrary to the purpose or spirit of the site.

Am I out of line ignoring the request for one reason per answer? If someone edits my response down to one reason, would it be out of line for me to revert the edit?

Answer 1

I see no problem with “one response per answer” provided the questions have lots of valid answers, e.g:

• Charities that accept bike donations
• Bicycling apps for Android

This is a good way of organize this sort of information; the other option is having a single main answer that gets edited to include all the information from the other answers. I would rather we went for the hybrid, with “one response per answer”, then someone to combine them into a single answer that gets accepted. However there is no great harm in just leaving it as “one response per answer”.

However in the case of “What are the reasons for and against wearing a bicycle helmet?” It is very possible for a single person to write an answer that sums up the arguments on both sides well; therefore I think we should be aiming for a single good answer. Remember it is expected that you will edit your answer to include information from other answers. When SO was first out we were told that one of the best ways for a new users to get rep, is to find a question with 3 or 4 good answers and then write a single answer that includes the information for all the good answers in an easy to understand format.

Answer 2

Stack Exchange exists, at least in part, as a way of countering the chaos and noise you see on traditional web forums. Community Wiki pages are, by their nature, somewhat less-organized than the regular question/answer-structured pages. Ideally, they're simply differently-organized.

My feeling is that the one-reason/product/[foo]-per-answer requests on these threads are a way of organizing the CW pages, making them easier to scan for a first-time user. If someone googles "reasons to wear a helmet" and gets a page of answers and chit-chat, no matter how compelling the writing, they'll see that as just another forum if they're not familiar with Stack Exchange sites.

These sites exist, in part, as a way of organizing reliable information, or at least information deemed reliable by the community. The entire Stack Exchange network of sites is essentially designed to act as one large, self-generating poll. If people can't vote on individual answers (or individual concepts), then the information presented, isn't nearly as useful to this site, no matter how correct or compelling.

Answer 3

I don't usually post answers to my own questions, but I wanted to express another opinion...

As @neilfein said, Jeff Atwood commented:

I don't think one reason per post works well here at all. I would rebuild this question from scratch and ask people to make the most compelling case they can -- either for or against -- and cite experiences and data to back up that case.

While I greatly prefer answers that are complete / summaries so that I can scan the top couple of answers, I can see the usefulness of the "one reason per answer" in some cases.

In this one it's problematic because it's harder to scan for the Pro and Con arguments individually. If reasons are going to be limited to one per answer, I would recommend doing separate questions eg.

What is the best reason to wear a helmet (or padded lycra bike shorts, or use tubes with presta valves, etc.)?

And the counter question -

What is the best reason to NOT wear a helmet?

That way, not only are the answers sorted by the voting, the Pro or Con question is up-voted and sorted as well.

Answer 4

After posting my original answer to this question, I'm coming around to the complex-answer way of thinking on this. One-point-per-answer may be good where the question is a simple one, but the current helmet question is not a simple question. (This thread may be useful as a reference when generating a complete argument, however.)

Helmet arguments often get extremely nasty on the internet (and in real life). The question Arguments for/against bike lanes? shows, with a slightly less-volatile issue than the helmet debate, that this community is extremely capable of generating good answers to difficult questions. We did get a few nasty responses on the one-point-per-answer helmet thread, but hardly a firestorm of them.

However, posting two threads such as Gary suggested -- one "what is the best reason to wear a helmet" and the other "what is the best reason to NOT wear a helmet" -- would probably generate a lot of interesting answers, but doing that wouldn't actually answer the underlying question, which is Should I wear a helmet? Even though there may be no clear answer to this question (the answer may be that there isn't enough hard data to answer this yet), I think we need to ask that underlying question.

Answer 5

I don't think there should be any attempts to enforce "one response per answer" format in most cases. I think in all cases it's reasonable and desirable to determine the underlying question and answer that as best as possible, even if it means ignoring some of the details. In other words, giving the questioner what they want is better than giving them what they ask for, and giving them what they need is even better.

I do think that this format on the bicycle helmet question may have helped keep the discussion friendly. I think that this topic is far too close to "which religion should I follow?". There's simply too much bad history (from outside bicycles.SE) over many decades on this topic for it to be an objective question, or even a fair subjective question. I don't think it's really a question anybody's going to go looking for

I think the "cycling apps for android" question is really a poll for most popular/useful android app for cycling, and that's ok. Putting several apps in one response would get that response upvoted for the best app and it wouldn't be clear that the other apps in the response just got dragged along for the ride.

I think the one response per answer is perfect for things like our terminology index, where it's likely that you'll want to link to an individual response.

I think in most other cases, something like "one answer per response" is just silly and you should ignore it and concentrate on providing the best question possible.