One 'Item' Per Answer Policy

Question

I don't usually go over to the meta side of things. but I was surprised at the comment my comment got. And when talking about comments on comments, meta seems to be the place to go.

I understand that subjective questions are discouraged. However, when subjective questions come up on other stack sites I use (which is pretty much just StackOverflow) a standard approach in answering is one 'item' per answer. Maybe that's must have webapps or best JavaScript books or even what domain should be used for food and cooking, but each time it's how the answers shape up and sometimes specifically requested in the question.

So when I suggested this for 'For what foods is a microwave a preferred method of cooking?', I was told that

The whole 1 per answer is actually discouraged. This site isn't meant for polls. In particular it doesn't scale well.

I checked the FAQ, and all I see is the standard 'subjective, argumentative, or require extended discussion' list. I get that the original question - being subjective - may fall under what's 'discouraged' but I don't get how answering the subjective questions that are allowed in a one per answer manner is (or should be) discouraged.

From what I can tell, it's a good model that has worked on other stack sites.

So Is food and cooking different in this regard? Is the 'one per' method actually discouraged? If so, where?

Update: Just a new thought - I wonder what the response would have been if I had synthesized the 'best' (in my view of course) answers into mine? Or taken another answer (it was already CW) and added to it? Would I have had another moderator telling me I was doing it wrong?

Related meta question: Should questions that have a list of answers be allowed?

Answer 1

There tend to be three schools of thought on polls on these sites, which I'll outline briefly:

1. The Not A Real Question school

   According to this school, a Q&A site should be strictly Q&A. Polls don't have objective answers and therefore aren't "real" questions.

   I am a card-carrying member of this school on Stack Overflow and think it should be mercilessly applied on any "mature" SE site, but that approach may not always be appropriate for new SE sites (especially beta sites) that are still actively trying to recruit members.

2. The Community Wiki Answer school

   I also like to call this the "Joel" school because I think that it was his original vision for Community Wiki. This school says that polls and lists should be treated like a Wikipedia page, with the question itself being roughly equivalent to the preamble (but phrased in question form).

   Notice that "answer" isn't pluralized here. The "wiki" is a single answer that is collaboratively edited by the community. The lack of reputation earned is merely a side-effect of the fact that the answer is the combined effort of tens or potentially hundreds of members.

3. The One Per Answer school, AKA the All About Reputation school

   This school believes that poll questions are potentially bad because they're a form of rep gaming (AKA rep farming or rep harvesting) - questions that people start not because they really care about the topic but because they think they'll be popular and earn the questioner lots of reputation.

   Non-wiki polls really are a form of rep farming because other members, eager to cash in on some quick rep, all upvote each other and the questions to keep the question "hot". This school, however, believes that rep farming is the one and only problem with polls, and aside from that, they're as good as any other question. Therefore, we should use SE's voting system to rank answers and utilize Community Wiki to prevent rep-farming.

I won't lie - OPA is clearly the de facto standard on every Stack Exchange site today. There are, however, a number of troubling issues inherent in this concept:

• It unconsciously ascribes ulterior motives to the question author, which is unfair;
• It does not prevent badge farming, which is still a problem;
• It ignores more conventional incentives for over-participation - socializing and herding;
• Voting patterns suffer from chronological bias (oldest answers are typically favoured);
• Pagination makes a large number of answers incredibly difficult to read;
• Once a certain momentum is reached, answers become heavily duplicated due to the above;
• It casts Community Wiki as a feature intended to protect subjective/inappropriate questions.

In my personal opinion, OPA is a very misguided idea, conceptualized by some folks who didn't really understand the purpose of Community Wiki (or really the idea behind Stack Overflow/Stack Exchange) and subsequently used as a blunt instrument by the inclusionist crowd - people who believe that all content except spam is precious and should never be blocked or deleted.

People will always say that the system works great and has lead to some amazing, educational questions, but if you really start to pry, you'll usually find out that most of these people didn't read beyond the first page or two of answers, which isn't a good system at all - it suffers from the same problem that discussion forums suffer from, the problem that Stack Exchange was intended to solve, that being that important content is buried in noise and many if not most answers don't get a fair hearing.

So I agree that OPA is or should be discouraged. I would prefer that Community Wiki mode be used the way it is intended to be used, to collaborate on a single detailed answer. The system doesn't make that easy; there's no way to restrict the number of answers or to merge answers, so I never really expect the "list of X" questions to be handled properly by the community and I'm not going to attempt any ham-fisted moderation when OPA is used. But I do strongly disagree that OPA should be encouraged or demanded as it sometimes is (often under threat of closing, on other SE sites). That just communicates the false message that we're actively trying to support polls, when in reality they're merely tolerated in small quantities.

Essentially, to make a long story short, I'm not going to get upset when I see "one per answer" polls, but I would really prefer for people not to spread the message that it is the way to handle list/poll questions, because it really isn't.

Answer 2

I'll give a shot at answering this the way I see it after a bit of enlightening back and forth with Aaronut - hope that doesn't ruffle any feathers.

So Is food and cooking different in this regard? Is the 'one per' method actually discouraged? If so, where?

The best answer as to where seems to be on the Meta sites. Which could be problematic, since the meta sites aren't necessarily (at least in my experience) frequented by the average user.

The two things here that I think make it problematic are the expectation of knowledge and the position of moderator.

I think it's important to note that the reprimand came from a moderator, because that has the 'feel' of a warning from a police officer. In the 'community' they are the 'authorities'. And at least how I read the comment, it seems to have a tone of "let me explain to you what should be obvious". Of course, I very well could be reading the tone incorrectly.

To create an (admittedly silly) analogy, it's like driving with your headlights on in the daytime, and a state trooper coming along and saying, "You know, we actually discourage that. That's not what headlights are for." You scratch your head because you've done it many time before, you've seen others do it, from your experience it works well, and you've never seen a sign saying not to do that. You later ask another state trooper about it and the response is, "Well, back at the barracks and in the diner we all frequent we talk about it a lot - even with the drivers that hang out with us - and the consensus is, it's a bad idea."

At that point you have to wonder, if it's bad enough to be pulled over and warned about, why isn't it posted someplace more public?

That, at least in my limited experience, it how food and cooking is different.

I had the expectation that what I've seen (and - gasp - even done) on other stack sites would be acceptable on this site. Perhaps I've just been lucky, and not 'pulled over' (or seen anyone 'pulled over') on the other sites.

It just seems - in my opinion - that if a moderator is going to correct a user for suggesting something that is common on other sites, it should be posted in the FAQ or something similar. To me, 'we talk about it on meta' doesn't cut it.

But as intimated in the comments of Aaronut's answer, if a moderator said, "We would rather list type questions were answered by a community edited single answer instead of OPA" - then I wouldn't have given it a second thought.

The problem, as I see it, is telling a user they did something wrong, when they would only know that if they hung out on Meta.

Just to be as clear as possible, I post this not to attack anyone, but in an honest effort to provide some feedback that could possibly be used by those setting the direction of this site. This made me feel immediately like an 'outsider', even though I'm familiar with other stack sites. I would think if this happens frequently, it will be detrimental to the site - which I hope to continue to use, just perhaps a bit more tentatively from now on.

Update: While this reflected my original understanding of the comment - a moderator telling me what a site policy was - hobodave's comment on this answer shows that was not his intention, he was just responding as to what he would prefer. Big difference there. I really don't think I'd be the only one to misread that. However, if it's not a site policy it certainly shouldn't be in any FAQ or similar.