When should answers be deleted

Question

The help center provides some guidance about deleting answers

Answers that do not fundamentally answer the question may be removed. This includes answers that are:

• commentary on the question or other answers
• asking another, different question
• “thanks!” or “me too!” responses
• exact duplicates of other answers
• barely more than a link to an external site
• not even a partial answer to the actual question

One issue is that many low quality answers still have net positive scores preventing high-rep users from casting delete vote. This is particularly true of questions that make the Hot Network Question (HNQ) list. This results in users flagging low quality answers, but often these flags are cast on answers that do not fall clearly into the help center description of why some answers are deleted.

Once the answer is flagged, it goes through a community review process. Every once in a while the review process is inconclusive leading to an auto generated flag for moderator attention where a moderator needs to decide if the answer should be deleted. There have been complaints in the past about moderators reacting to these flags by deleting the answer (e.g., deleting). The only discussion I can find on deleting answers in general is this old question with a short answer and not a lot of visibility.

How do we want moderators to handle flags on answers that have net positive scores that seem to be poorly researched (i.e., worthy of down votes) and not obviously more than a partial answer to the actual question that have resulted in an inconclusive review?

Answer 1

As a mod, when I do not feel a post deserves to be deleted unilaterally, my preference is to leave "not an answer" and "low quality post" flags active - that is, not mark the flag as helpful nor dismiss it. The reason is that these flags put posts into the "Low quality posts" review queue, where other users then vote on them. (Marking the flag as helpful or dismissing the flag would remove the post from the review queue prematurely.)

Once the review is completed, one of three things will happen:

• the post will have been deleted by the community from the review queue. (Or, it was deleted by the owner, or it was fixed, in response to comments from the review queue.)
• people have weighed in via review, indicating that most find the post worth keeping. In this case I will not delete the post, and I will mark the flag as helpful (if it was a reasonable flag).
• people have weighed in via review with votes to delete, but not enough to actually remove the post (e.g. it gets five votes to delete, but it needs six). In this case I might add an additional "delete" vote so that the post is deleted, if I feel it's warranted. I will then mark the flag as helpful (if it was a reasonable flag).

Answer 2

As a mod, I only unilaterally delete posts if they are:

• spam or nonsense,
• ask a question,
• are Thanks!-type comments, or
• are blatantly rude or abusive.

Absent that, I would prefer to wait for flags and reviews, as ff524 suggests in her comment.

Answer 3

When should answers be deleted

I believe that answers should not be deleted beyond the reasons given in the help page. If mods want to delete answer beyond the reasons given in the help page, we should expand the list as a community.

How do we want moderators to handle flags on answers that have net positive scores that seem to be poorly researched (i.e., worthy of down votes) and not obviously more than a partial answer to the actual question that have resulted in an inconclusive review?

Downvote, edit or comment. I am not a mod, but I believe that low quality posts (that does not meet the deletion criteria) with mixed reviews should be downvoted, and not deleted. If a mod or a user can see a way to improve the answer, edit it away or comment for the OP to improve. I think we should always strive to improve the answers instead of deleting.

If the post is bad and is barely a partial answer to the question, downvotes will be sufficed to signal the OP that particular answer is not well-received by the community. While going on HNQ list may skew the amount of upvotes and downvotes, if the answer is truly low quality and the downvotes sufficiently justified, it will garner enough downvotes (I may be an optimist here). If it does not, and SE deems it important to address the HNQ upvote issue, SE should introduce a new feature as per the link StrongBad listed in the question. Failure to garner enough downvotes for a low quality answer should not be a reason for deletion.