In several different cases, I've encountered answers that were just... wrong. However, I don't know how to respond to this. Recently, I flagged a wrong answer, and it was declined and I was told not to do that in the future. How should we react to answers that simply aren't founded in fact?
Should they be:
How should I react to a completely wrong answer?
I’ve done that before too:
As the declined message states, don’t do this.
The site is first moderated by the community, not the moderators, so inaccurate content should be first moderated by the community in the form of downvotes. Usually, wrong answers are downvoted. But sometimes, they aren’t. When this happens, there are a few things you can do, depending on what issues the alleged wrong answer has.
This is often all that is needed to swing a wrong answer’s trajectory, at least while the answer is new. People often revisit answers they’ve read recently, and newer content receives the most new views, so a comment politely explaining your contention could change how others vote on the answer. This could even cause the author to change their mind, and they may just delete the answer altogether. But again, be polite, and don’t carry on extended discussions about it.
This is my personal favorite response to questions with poor or wrong answers. Readers may see it your way and vote accordingly, and the question author may even change the green check.
If your own downvoting, polite comments, and obviously superior answer don’t affect the upward trajectory of a poor answer, and you really believe the answer is so poor that it needs to be escalated to the moderation team, moderators have the ability to add a banner to answer posts asking that support or citations be added to the answer. This should be reserved for blatantly unsupported answers. I will flag answers like this every once in a while, but generally only for answers that have a clear lack of support or citation that appear to be receiving upvotes anyway. This is not for answers that provide support you disagree with. To be clear, I use this type of flag very sparingly. For answers that don’t even try to provide any evidence, and instead just blurt out an opinion with no discussion, the “Very Low Quality” flag can be used and the answer may get deleted in review (see this post for a detailed discussion of how I decide to delete VLQ posts).
And finally, we have the thing, besides downvoting, you should do most of the time when you encounter a wrong answer:
Downvote however you want. But other than that, most of the time, there’s nothing else that needs to be done. It will be okay if nothing else happens. I have only one time ever come to meta to advocate for an answer to be deleted for being wrong, and it was because of external circumstances: Should we delete this -17 answer that appears as an answer snippet in google search? I have more often done some of the other things on this list, but I have most often downvoted and moved on.
Sometimes, a grossly negative score actually sends a helpful signal to readers. I’m going to guess that this answer is part of the reason you’ve asked this meta question, as you posted a related question around the same time. For that answer, a -19 score says something meaningful to readers. Answer scores that low are exceedingly rare on this site, and I think there’s value in telling future reads “hey this answer is one of the worst on this site”. The negative score is far more helpful than deleting that answer could ever be.
If you can recognize what's wrong, you probably know what's right, so give the community a nice, right answer.
As Thomas Markov pointed out in his fine answer, this sends a signal to the answerer that something is wrong.
As above, but if the comment identifies just what is wrong the answerer can improve their answer. This is possibly more helpful than option 2. Sometimes this may induce an argument, other times not.
Does what option 3 offers. This may avoid ill will that a downvote sometimes brings, but if someone else downvotes it may leave the impression that you carried out option 3. Sometimes this may induce an argument, other times not.
An option that doesn't help the general quality of content on the site, but it may be all you have time for today.
The choice, Willow, is yours. 😊
