When is an answer not an answer?

Question

Whilst reviewing answers I came across an answer that was several paragraphs long and I imagine that without reading it there are those who might consider it to be ok and happily move on to the next answer in the review queue.

After reading the answer I decided to flag it as not an answer, because in my view, it did not attempt to answer the question, apart from a few key words, such as "windows 8" and "install" it was nothing at all to do with the question.

My flag was declined by a moderator who gave the reason "declined - a moderator reviewed your flag, but found no evidence to support it"

So I decided to raise another flag about the post, stating that it did not attempt to answer the question, which was also declined with the reason "declined - flags should not be used to indicate technical inaccuracies, or an altogether wrong answer"

After a little deeper investigation I found that the question had been copied from another site, so I left a comment with a link, the question has since been removed.

My question is, when is an answer not an answer? Does writing several paragraphs (copy and pasted or not) about a subject unrelated to the question qualify as "not an answer"?

Answer 1

This may qualify as a gray area. My opinion though, is that the 'answer' you refer to here was not an answer in any way, shape, or form. Or, to be more semantic to the flagging reason, it was not an attempt to answer the question.

An 'attempt' to answer a question requires having read and at least thinking you have understood the question. There is no way that the person posting that answer ever read and understood that question at all. Therefore, the resulting answer could not be considered to have been an 'attempt to answer the question'. There are cases where someone could make an honest mistake and misunderstand a question; I can't imagine how that could have legitimately happened, here.

The only possible thing I can think that happened here is someone used some sort of quasi-automated system (eg. a bot) to post 'random', keyword-related text as a response to some keyword search here, perhaps as a way to try to see if they could farm rep to dump elsewhere.

As I noted above, sometimes people do similar things honestly, and I don't tend to delete those when flagged. But this case seems obvious to me.

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Why did the flag get declined, then? Probably because the answer may have appeared to be an attempt to answer the question as it was presented in the flag queue. Not all of the relevant information is immediately presented to us in the queue, which sometimes can make our choice of action on a flag seem obvious to us - and at times, incorrectly. Figure in personal bias, the pattern of flags that have been coming in, whether we are distracted by a dog, spouse, co-worker, boss, or herd of unicorns, and stuff happens.

It's also entirely possible that the mod who handled your flag disagrees with me.

Answer 2

"Not an answer" does not mean "a bad answer", or "not quite an answer to this question, as it turns out".

It means "not an answer". That is, not an answer at all.

The answer is certainly an answer; in this instance, it's a bad answer that misses the mark and, as such, you should downvote it and move on.

Flag comments and links as "not an answer".

Answer 3

This was the answer:

(Here's the transcript for blind people)

The most important question when reviewing answers for "not an answer" answers, imho, is: Is this an attempt to answer? If the answer is no, and only in that case, you should flag it as not an answer.

Examples of "not an attempt" answer are:

• "Thanks" answers
• "I have the same problem" answers
• "New question" answers
• ...

Notice that the difference if very subtle between "Is this an answer" and "Is this an attempt". I ask you to judge the intention, not what came out of that intention.

Regarding this particular answer, the answer to the above question is obviously "yes". The user tried to answer the question but made the mistake of copy-pasting entire paragraphs from a specific link (as you made notice in the comment). I assume this is the reason it got deleted.

Therefore yes, this is can be considered an answer, but a very low quality one.