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This is just a suggestion might be few others will agree with it.

There should be some Conclusion or Summary type of section for closed or accepted answers because some hot questions some time become a type of debate or discussion and as we have different people with different opinions so there should be some conclusion or short summary type of thing which will describe the direction of the question and then users don't have to read all the answers.

Thanks.

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    I don't see how this could work, who'd write the summaries for example? – yannis Dec 21 '12 at 6:36
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    what if a question gets reopened? Also, I would expect readers to be able to read closure reason and draw appropriate conclusions ("yeah there are a debatable answers to closed / not constructive questions") – gnat Dec 21 '12 at 6:50
  • Hi Yannis, According to me Summary should be posted by some authorized users with special credentials and those users will do that on basis of ANSWERS posted by different users and there vote casts. same as that of EDIT – Logicalj Dec 21 '12 at 6:52
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There are existing mechanisms for this - The accepted answer. This states that this is the most helpful answer.

  1. The OP accepts an answer as is. This indicates that that someone pretty much got the solution that was most helpful.
  2. There is an answer that's almost the most helpful, so the OP edits that with the one or two points that others raised and accepts that answer.
  3. The OP posts their own answer drawing in all the relevant information from other answers and comments and accepts that. They should acknowledge the other answers and comments of course.

In all of these cases the question is marked as "solved" by dint of it having an accepted answer. People are still free to post new answers as the OP will be notified in their inbox, but they won't necessarily get the views from other people looking for questions to answer.

If you come across a question that doesn't have an accepted answer but has several answers that offer part solutions you could post your own "complete" answer. You could even mark the answer as "Community Wiki" if you wanted to.

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  • as far as I can tell, OP asks about closed questions, where there is no option like you describe: post your own "complete" answer – gnat Dec 21 '12 at 11:10
  • the accepted answer is not necessarily the most helpful answer, its just the one the OP felt was best. They aren't always the same so its important to make that distinction. – Ryathal Dec 21 '12 at 14:09
  • @Ryathal - Indeed. That's what I meant, but clearly not what I said – ChrisF♦ Dec 21 '12 at 14:14
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I really don't see this working.

Let's think about what has to go in something like this:

  1. Site designers and Stack Exchange management would have to agree that we need something like this. If there is not any community support for the implementation of this, there is no way you would get this considered, or even looked at. Plus, something like this would need general acceptance from about 95% of Stack Exchange site. You can't just make a major change like this on one site.
  2. Let's say this does get general community acceptance (which I doubt it would because nothing is really wrong here). Site designer(s) (I'm fairly positive Jin is the only one) would have to come up with the layout, and the developers would have to test an implement it. Now, this is just the general development process that we all know, but having only one site designer doesn't help your cause.
  3. Finally, SE usually tries out the feature on a few sites at first before totally launching it. Do you honestly think that people are going to write summaries on every accepted answer and closed question? We're all volunteering our time and knowledge to the site (unless you're an employee). I would be really hasty about asking and answering questions if I knew I was going to have to write a summary. Plus, moderators are volunteering their time also. They don't get paid, and from what I'm aware of, I doubt they'd want to do this work either.

I'm not trying to say that anybody is lazy. I'm not trying to say that we don't want to make this community a better place. What I am saying though is that nothing is broken, and if it's not broke, don't fix it.

For more info on what you can do with the current system in place, see ChrisF's answer.

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