One of the stated goals of the site was the have one comprehensive answer to each question. I think we can definitively say that it hasn't worked out that way. I think the reason is reputation. If one person answer the question with 40% of the information that a comprehensive answer would contain, and another with another 40% with 20% scattered among three other answers. Who's answer will get edited with the combined information and get the further upvotes? It just doesn't happen. People don't want to edit questions and mess with someone else's reputation (quite rightly, IMO - how would you feel getting a downvote for something added to your answer that you didn't write?).

One idea to get towards that goal would be to have a community answer on each question, with say a small reputation bump (2 points?) for participating in making it. To prevent reputation inflation, you can only get the 2 points from a given question one time, with a daily limit (say 10 points) for doing it on questions asked by others.

Then when the question is seen for posterity, it will be the first answer.

The issue is what to do with the accepted answer? One possibility is to only open the community answer once there is an accepted answer and pre-fill it with that answer.

Does any of this make sense to anyone else?


Question: Running something in a cron environment?
Answer: You can do that by redirecting STDERR to the write-end of a pipe, then closing the read end:

#!/usr/bin/env perl
pipe R,STDERR;
close R;
warn 'foo';
print "bar";