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What is the best practice for reviewing low quality posts?

For example, this review came up:

enter image description here

It certainly is a low quality post:

  • It is trivially short
  • It adds no new information at all, really

On the other hand:

  • It is on topic
  • It is technically (sort of) correct, at least trivially.

Should we be voting to delete, or just down voting?

1 Answer 1

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In this case, I think voting is plenty for now. I'm not actually sure if the author is trying to suggest something different or not - so I commented too.

As with all things, there's a bit of a continuum. At the good end, we have the perfect answer. Moving along in the negative direction, we pass through the answers worth upvoting, the ones you shrug at, and the answers that are worth downvoting ("not useful"). Coming to the other end, there are the exceptionally low quality answers which merit deletion; at the extreme, these become "not an answer".

So the question you ask is one that has to be answered on a case-by-case basis, just like whether a given answer is worth downvoting. As a moderator, there's fairly little that I will actually delete just for being low quality. Voting is quite sufficient to sort bad answers to the bottom, and even gray out the sufficiently bad ones. If an answer is dangerously low quality/incorrect (food/kitchen safety), though, I'll likely delete it. I'll also be more inclined to delete low quality answers if everything they say was already said better in an older answer.

As always, if you think it's borderline, worth a mod having a look at, feel free to flag - or simply leave it in the review queue so the mods will see it.

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  • "even gray out the sufficiently bad ones" -- is this a feature? I have never noticed it.
    – SAJ14SAJ
    May 31, 2013 at 17:47
  • @SAJ14SAJ: It happens for answers with a score of -3 or lower. You probably haven't noticed it because (a) it doesn't happen that often and (b) they're already sorted at the bottom.
    – Aaronut
    Jun 1, 2013 at 3:12
  • @SAJ14SAJ If you really want to find those answers, just search for is:answer, sort by votes, and jump to the end.
    – Cascabel Mod
    Jun 1, 2013 at 3:24
  • The search syntax for questions and answers is cool to know, but I was just surprised as I had never realized that feature exists.
    – SAJ14SAJ
    Jun 1, 2013 at 4:39

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