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Should self-answered Q&A use separate answers for different techniques/approaches (even if there's a caveat that applies overall)?
Looking back at my own Q&A How can I build a string from smaller pieces?, the answer is incredibly long. I'm essentially showing five different ways to solve the problem - because they all exist, and well-informed developers should know about all of them.
Would it make more sense to split the content up and make a separate answer for each? On the one hand, that would probably be a lot more digestible - I wouldn't feel the same compulsion to use details/summary tags to shrink everything in (nesting such tags feels deceptive to me, in a way). It would also allow others to comment on each approach separately, offer reactions etc.
On the other hand, I don't want to come across as trying to farm votes (even if I certainly think that some ways to solve the problem are better than others, and separate scores from the community might better reflect that reality). More importantly, I wouldn't know what to do with the warning at the top of the answer - since it applies to a consideration of the overall problem, rather than the techniques used to solve it.
If I continue adding the sort of content here that I plan on doing, I can only see this problem repeating itself; so I want to get a general sense of the best way to deal with these situations.
Should I:
- Leave the question and answer as is, and wait until we've come to a resolution on an article-type category etc. before trying to do more content like this?
- Split the answer in five and move the warning into the question?
- Split the answer in five and copy-paste the warning to each answer?
- Split the question in six, somehow hammering the warning into the shape of a separate answer?
- Something else?
2 answers
I believe one of the main strengths of Q&A websites is that they provide a more digestible alternative to dense documentation. Especially for programmers who do not yet know how to find/use the documentation for the language that they are working with. The answer (and even the question [1]) is/are not very digestible and therefore they might not be that useful for people looking for an answer to this question.
I don't think vote farming would be an issue, since most people will have a preference and only upvote one or maybe two answers that they would also have thought of (some of the options are just not practically relevant anymore and will probably not be upvoted).
The warning on the top of the answer seems completely misplaced in the context of this question[1:1]. They are relevant, but I believe that most people who would need an answer to this question would not understand most of what is stated there. At least, I would hope that people who are unable to build strings in Python will not be writing critical database code. Moreover, the warning seems to suggest that string concatenation is a good way to build SQL query strings, which is definitely not the case. Therefore, I would just drop the warning and/or reformulate the question to provide the context that you want this question to be about.
As a result, I would propose to do something else: Split up the answer in five separate answers and drop the overall warning (and remove the noisy bits[1:2] from the question).
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the answer is incredibly long
It really isn't - though it might look that way because of the extensive use of large font headlines. I think it is a good answer - there's no problem in discussing multiple ways of doing something, addressing every angle. That's good engineering, rather.
Would it make more sense to split the content up and make a separate answer for each?
No, because that would fragment the explanations and answers don't get displayed in any particular order. It would just make it harder to compare the different possible techniques.
Overall I don't think there's a problem here. Someone who can't be bothered to read 1-2 pages of technical text shouldn't work with technology in general and not with programming in particular. Rather, you are expected to read some 500 to 1000 pages of technical text before you can title yourself "naive beginner in programming language x".
Leave the question and answer as is
I think so, it is fine.
Also some article category won't really change anything here. For example have a look at this similar "paper category" post I wrote over at Electrical Engineering: Why should I not use dynamic memory allocation in embedded systems? It's essentially just a Q&A still, but one single post. Like in your case I needed to make a list of various practices and fragmenting it over multiple posts would only make it less readable.
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