-3
$\begingroup$

Questions are asked and answered regularly on the site. Also the answers are upvoted and downvoted alike. Upvoted answers are the ones that are good in quality, are useful and accurate. On the other hand, downvoted answers are poorly written, or misinforming, or do not serve the purpose.

What if we flag every downvoted answer under 'very low quality'? I think flagging and removing as many downvoted answers as we could will keep the site cleaner than before and people visiting the site will not have to encounter poor answers. It may facilitate them a lot. Should we follow this notion?

$\endgroup$
5

1 Answer 1

3
$\begingroup$

There are obvious issues with deleting anything that sits at a score of (say) −1, so for the sake of argument, let's we restrict this only to answers that are heavily downvoted, and are obviously factually wrong.

Personally, I've long felt that a good, reputed, source of information should not explicitly seek to retain wrong information, even if said wrong information is downvoted. I think it's not a good look. However, that's just my own opinion: Stack Exchange's long-standing policy is that downvoted, incorrect content should not be removed: see e.g. Why shouldn't I delete wrong answers? and also the corresponding Meta.SE FAQ.

According to this policy, deletion is intended for stuff that is not even incorrect: for example, stuff that doesn't attempt to answer the question (and hence cannot be categorised as 'correct' or 'wrong'). As a moderator I hope I did my best to adhere to this, and although you could go rogue and delete / vote to delete if you had the appropriate privileges, I don't suggest doing so as this explicitly goes against the spirit of the platform.

$\endgroup$

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .