<h1>TL;DR - Sometimes, short answers are comprehensive answers.</h1>

<ol>
<li><p>I believe that if a question can be <em>completely</em> answered briefly, then a brief answer is fine. </p></li>
<li><p>I also believe that the purpose of stats.SE is to provide a long-term repository of statistics$^*$ knowledge. </p></li>
<li><p>I don't think that there is necessarily any tension between these two points. Sometimes, people ask questions with simple answers: </p>

<ul>
<li>the way that you get labels for data is by having a human review the data and label it.</li>
<li>the way you figure out if $L^2$ regularization improves a neural network is by conducting an experiment; </li>
<li>the formula for Xavier initialization isn't complicated; </li>
<li>neural networks depend on the training data;</li>
<li>"loss function" has many synonyms.</li>
</ul></li>
<li><p>None of this changes that questions which are overly broad, unclear, off-topic, or duplicates should be closed as such.</p></li>
<li><p>I do not believe that short answers are <strong>necessarily</strong> lower-quality. </p></li>
</ol>

<p>One might summarize these points as "A good answer is only as long as necessary," or "Sometimes, short answers are comprehensive answers."</p>

<p>If we <em>only</em> write <em>lengthy</em> answers, there is a gap in answer coverage.</p>

<ul>
<li><p>If the question is on-topic and not a duplicate, it will remain open. </p></li>
<li><p>But it will also remain <em>unanswered</em> if the answer is so straightforward that two sentences suffice <em>and</em> there is a taboo against short answers. Unanswered, open questions serve no useful purpose.</p></li>
<li><p>If there is a perception that the answer box is solely for five-paragraph answers with equations, figures and citations, then questions are instead answered with comments. This isn't what comments are for, nor is it how SE is supposed to work.</p></li>
<li><p>A consequence of not providing appropriately brief answers is that <a href="https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5325/we-have-a-very-large-widening-gap-between-questions-and-answers-how-do-we-fix">we have a very large &amp; widening gap between questions and answers</a>. </p></li>
</ul>

<p>I don't think that short answers are inherently in tension with any of the goals of stats.SE. I just think that because we have so many high-quality answers which are of some length, that has created an impression that the only good answer is a lengthy answer. I'm only advocating for a slight adjustment in how answer-writers go about their task, not a shift in how the platform works.</p>

<hr>

<p>$^*$ My definition of "statistics" extends to include what many people call "machine learning" and "data science."</p>
