I've seen a handful of questions that have been asked by someone, and then shortly after answered by that same person as an update, or by someone in a quick follow up comment. These questions have answers, but the people involved in the answers, for whatever reason, did not have the time to post the answers in the standardly recognized Q&A format on SE.
What is the best way to handle this?
I feel, that if someone has posted a clear answer and a few months have passed, someone with the right editing permissions and OCD personality qualities may post a real answer to the question (instead of comment or update to the question) and quote that person in the answer, giving the proper attribution to what was done, and just taking the responsibility to get things in the right Q&A format.
For comments, this seems less complicated. You can post the answer from somebody's comment and you don't want to edit their comment and change the message history there.
For people who have updated their Question to also include the answer, I feel the right thing to do would be to quote them in the Answer post, and then to edit the original question and remove the Updated part of the Question that provides the answer. It just seems a little more drastic to go into someone elses post, remove half of it's content, and repost that content as a quote from your own account.
I just ran into this scenario on this post. I really want to go delete the part of the text in the Question that provides the answer, but I'm struggling to justify it!
