I'm for a win / win situation in this case.
If there are multiple valid answers, which all answer the question to the same degree.
- Give them all an up vote
- And then accept the one that is the easiest to understand, not to read, but to understand
The point here is to give newcomers good advice when the search for problems, it doesn't make much sense when there are 3 valid answers and one of them is extremely cryptically and one accepts that one, because it solved his problem the fastest, since he understands a ton of cryptic synonyms.
We should not think of this site as a "Complete refactoring pros" only site. It should be about teaching and spreading the concepts of refactoring, DRYing, testing and all the other stuff that makes code both good and maintainable.
So my above solution has the following outcomes:
- Answerers are happy, they got some rep for their effort
- The one who wrote it in the most understandable way gets the bonus, so we're encouraging good writing not only of code, but also of answers
- New people coming to the site will most likely look for the accepted answers first, so if those are goodly written, they will also benefit from it