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In my most recent question, Realistic economic impact of a Hero, I've gotten a lot of pretty good answers but none of them have really hit it out of the ballpark. I could just accept one of the highest voted answers and be done with it, but I feel like that would be abandoning my question.

As I read through the answers, I noticed that there are a lot of good ideas spread among the answers. If all of them were bundled up in one answer, it could make for an amazing answer.

So I had the thought, why don't I do that myself? I could make a community wiki answer that compiles the other answers. I would then accept that answer.

Does this seem like a reasonably good idea?

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  • $\begingroup$ I would gather the information you like from each answer and add to your question as an edit. Explain why you can't credit any single post as "the answer", and leave it at that. Be sure to vote up those answers which helped you. $\endgroup$
    – AndreiROM
    Nov 9, 2015 at 18:15

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In the end, how to handle the situation is up to you. There are multiple ways to do it, but I can see two main options here.

Posting a community wiki answer yourself and accepting that is a possible way of documenting the parts of the posted answers that you went with, but since community wiki answers float only based on community votes, lots of people might not even notice it even if you do accept it. Also, since it wouldn't add anything new, but rather just repeat content from other answers, it might be seen as a not very constructive contribution.

The other alternative is to simply not accept any answer at all. While answer acceptance is nice, nothing forces you to accept an answer to a question. I have a few questions where I am in the same boat; multiple answers all making good points that contributed to the path I took. In such a situation, picking the single answer that helped the most can (as you have found) be very difficult, and perhaps the best choice then is to not pick any one single answer at all. Take the parts from each that helped you the most, vote up those answers, proceed with building your world, and let the votes from the community do the rest of sorting answers for future visitors.

If you are posting an answer and adding a solution of your own then you can of course accept that. But in that case, you might not (probably don't) want to make your answer community wiki.

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  • $\begingroup$ I really liked the idea of accepting a community wiki, now you've ruined it :( $\endgroup$
    – DaaaahWhoosh
    Nov 5, 2015 at 19:13
  • $\begingroup$ I think answering your own question is perfectly accepted by SE, even if there are other answers. Of course it would not appear at the top, but it can still be useful. It would be good nevertheless to add some content instead of summarizing what the others have written. $\endgroup$
    – clem steredenn
    Nov 5, 2015 at 19:30
  • $\begingroup$ @bilbo_pingouin Absolutely, but that wasn't the impression I got from the OP. If you're adding useful content, then the prospect of an accepted self-answer is suddenly very different. But then you'd probably not go with a community wiki self-answer. $\endgroup$
    – user
    Nov 5, 2015 at 19:31
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You could always post a bounty asking for a canonical answer, maybe someone would take the time to compile the best parts from each of the answers.

Just mention in your bounty posting that is what you are looking for.

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  • $\begingroup$ This has the downside of relying on someone else to pick out the parts the OP found most useful. It thus might or might not work to the OP's advantage. $\endgroup$
    – user
    Nov 5, 2015 at 19:32
  • $\begingroup$ @MichaelKjörling Agreed, just an option that came to mind $\endgroup$
    – James
    Nov 5, 2015 at 19:33

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