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    That's a lot of trust to put in anyone, being able to singlehandedly remove posts. What's to stop someone with a lot of knowledge and a vindictive personality from just deleting everything they don't like, or competing answers to questions they've answered, under the claim that they're NAA?
    – Rand al'Thor
    Commented Nov 29, 2022 at 11:36
  • 5
    As with everything SE keeps transparant logs. If someone were to start deleting things at a disproportionate scale people would notice quite quickly and raise their concerns either to moderators or publicly on meta. If needed action could then be taken against a certain user. At the same time we trust mods with the same privilege, and even more privileges, cases of mod abuse are rare.
    – Luuklag
    Commented Nov 29, 2022 at 11:45
  • 1
    There is also the question on what people need to be recognised as SME's. Would we base that solely on objective gains on the site ( badges, rep) or do we want to take subjective measures (likeability, trust) into account as well.
    – Luuklag
    Commented Nov 29, 2022 at 11:47
  • 5
    I think this is actually counter to the Stack Exchange vision. The community is supposed to decide what is valuable and what is not by voting. If that isn’t working in some situations, the answer is not to just give up and let arbitrarily appointed SMEs delete other people’s content. The entire point of SE is that people don’t have to trust someone’s credentials; removing content from the community’s view should be reserved for spam, CoC violations, and automated cleanup of abandoned content.
    – ColleenV
    Commented Nov 29, 2022 at 12:08
  • Essentially, this feedback duplicates: meta.stackexchange.com/a/240712/282094 meta.stackexchange.com/a/280396/282094 meta.stackexchange.com/a/259859/282094 meta.stackexchange.com/a/260234/282094 - empowering Silver Tag Badge holders (to delete); which is a valid suggestion (1 vote weight for Bronze, 2 for Silver, 3 for Gold), allowing 5, 3, or 2 (respectively) users to vote to delete, with less than 20K rep.
    – Rob
    Commented Nov 29, 2022 at 17:40
  • @Luuklag that's the first thing I thought of. Is this going to be a privilege pegged to tag badges or will there be some other way to apply, for example with a subject matter exam, portfolio presentation, or election? Maybe I don't particularly enjoy answering [python] questions on Stack Overflow but am actually a Python expert with many years of professional experience. Can I submit my resume in order to gain SME status or is answering questions the only way? Can I opt to sit the Stack Overflow Comprehensive Subject Matter Exam in Advanced Python (TM) and claim my SME privilege if I pass?
    – Robert Columbia
    Commented Nov 29, 2022 at 20:39
  • Do you have any suggestions on possible concrete qualifications for who would/could get this role?
    – starball
    Commented Nov 29, 2022 at 23:04
  • 3
    According to this FAQ -- How do I properly use the "Not an Answer" flag? -- you in no way need to be a SME in order to recognise when something is "not an answer". It's not a question of whether an answer is at all "credible" -- it's a question of whether it is formatted as, of whether it even attempts to appear to be, an answer.
    – ChrisW
    Commented Nov 30, 2022 at 11:33
  • This is already done by demonstrating knowledge in the subject. People tend to trample over them anyways.
    – Braiam
    Commented Dec 8, 2022 at 0:18