<p>Yes. <a href="https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5326/1352">Embrace the twitter-style answer!</a></p>

<p>I am a firm believer in Pareto's principle, and a quick answer that is 80% correct is better than no answer that is 100% correct. I do not believe that StackExchange aims for Utter Impeccability. <a href="https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5325/we-have-a-very-large-widening-gap-between-questions-and-answers-how-do-we-fix/5326#comment16092_5326">I like to say</a> that <a href="https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5318/1352">time doesn't grow on trees</a>, so it's better to give an answer that helps the poster, rather than not give an answer at all.</p>

<p>Anyone who disagrees with your quick-and-dirty answer can downvote it, or post their own answers. Some of our more interesting threads have exactly this kind of competing answers.</p>

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<p>EDIT. To clarify, I am not advocating answering <em>bad</em> questions. Bad questions should be closed as "unclear" and the poster encouraged to improve them. (Yes, in this order, to avert answers while the question is yet unimproved. An answer to an ambiguous question will only serve to confuse later readers.)</p>

<p>Rather, I am talking about the kind of question that is clear, though maybe not very interesting. The kind that a student might ask in dealing with their data. These typically do not lend themselves to "great" answers. Frequently, there is nothing overly deep to them. Writing a "great" answer, say by pointing out background theory, or generalizations, will likely go over the head of the asker - who I assume is usually not a statistician, but a consumer of statistics - and rarely help anyone later on.</p>

<p>We get tons of such "bread-and-butter" questions every day. These are completely legitimate, and many of them can be answered quickly by any halfway competent statistician.</p>

<p>The question then is whether to write short answers to five of these, or a long answer to one in the same time. And this is where I come down firmly on the side of writing five short answers that have a chance of helping five people. Maybe one out of these five will ask for clarification, and then I can invest more time in editing and improving that specific thread. Much better than leaving four questions unanswered and writing a detailed answer on one question, which may well be far more than the OP wanted or needed.</p>

<p>This position of mine may be influenced by my working in an agile software development environment. We'd rather build something rudimentary, get feedback and improve incrementally, rather than try to build a large intricate piece of software in one go. (And, to repeat: the requirements to develop against need to be clear before the first unit test is written.)</p>

<p>I understand that <a href="https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/1248">people may see this differently</a> and advocate writing fewer, more careful answers. This may be more in keeping with the SE <a href="https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5390/1352">"repository of knowledge" aim</a>, but it will lead to (even) more unanswered questions, which <a href="https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5325/1352">the community seems to believe is a problem</a>. And, as I said, it won't help the psychology grad student who just wants to know how to deal with her data.</p>
