We occasionally get low quality answers. By this I mean questions that have a very low score and possibly flags — this is a relatively objective measure. What should we do with such answers? The Stack Exchange platform does not provide a clear way to handle wrong answers, and it is up to our community to decide.
If the answer is rude, very short, or completely unrelated to the question, there is a clear reason to delete it right away. But when the answer is polite, elaborate, and related to the question, no clear policy seems to require removal even if the answer is wrong.
Here is a concrete and clear example of an answer like this with a score of -7 and no votes up.
There are a couple of options:
- Let the answers be. The low score indicates that it is bad and nothing else needs to be done. They can serve as warning examples of what happens to certain kinds of answers. Low quality answers are automatically grayed out.
- Delete the answers. Very low quality content is never a benefit of any kind to the site. This site should contain well curated content, and the worst contributions need to be removed. Something saying "this is bad" doesn't make it okay to have bad things.
- Something else?
There is no automatic deletion of answers as far as I know.
Whatever we choose to do, please vote down and flag when you see questions and answers you feel have a problem. That always helps, and this question is about making that feedback even more helpful and impactful.