Why was this 'not-an-answer' flag declined? [duplicate]

Question

I flagged this answer as Not An Answer (NAA), because while this does point the OP in the direction of the correct answer, the answer as written should be a comment.

In the event the answer gets deleted, the content of it is:

You need to construct a query with a PIVOT.

This answer is a link-only answer to the MSDN documentation.

My flag was declined with the reason:

declined - flags should not be used to indicate technical inaccuracies, or an altogether wrong answer

I am curious as to why this was declined, considering this is a comment, should it have been flagged with other instead of not an answer?

Answer 1

This was actually addressed recently by Shog9, and much earlier by Anna Lear.

The gist is that if the answer ATTEMPTS to address the question, it should be downvoted instead of deleted or flagged, even if it is terrible.

Answer 2

Odds are there was some other flag on the post of a type other than NAA, possibly indicating that the problem was with some sort of technical inaccuracy. Since flags need to be either accepted on the whole or denied on the whole, and accepting an invalid flag is much more harmful (due to accepted flags being used for review audits) than rejecting a valid flag, this is the lesser of two evils.

Either that, or it could have just been a mis-click. It happens.

Regardless, it has since been deleted as it is clearly not an answer.

Answer 3

Here's my take on the matter:

1. That is, definitively, not an answer.
2. The moderator, whoever it was, who declined the flag was operating within guidelines. Guidelines, that I can have a lot of sympathy for; especially on a site the size and breadth of Stack Overflow. There's absolutely no way than any moderator can be technologically competent in every tag. There are, no doubt, tags that no moderator is able to form an opinion on and so they should not be expected to form one.
3. Link only answers are an abomination that should be expunged. They are contrary to, what I see as, the point of Stack Exchange; they are insulting to the question asker and should be seen as being barely above lmgtfy in the chain. Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange is about getting great answers to questions quickly; questions which are useful for a lot of people
4. A link to the documentation is barely above a RTFM. The difference in this case is the the poster was politer and didn't post it as a comment.
5. The community around the sql tag are highly guilty of allowing this kind of question. The "here is my data, here are the results I want, gimme" kind of question. In some cases this is completely justified; they're complicated requirements with extremely complicated queries that are well explained. In most cases the OP is simply lazy or doesn't know how to ask a question. These questions should be closed¹.
6. That question should have been closed immediately and not answered at all.

This is what should have happened:

You should have downvoted the question and voted to close, both of which I have already done. I'm a little surprised everyone's concentrating on the answer rather than the question also. That answer should be downvoted and a comment left indicating that the answer should be a comment. If you have 20k you should then vote to delete. If you have less than 20k I would flag as not an answer. That's just me; other's obviously disagree.

_{1. Though, if it's a question about how to work where to update account balance after a transaction (which there are far too many of) you might want to consider answering for your own sanity.}.

Answer 4

Apparently a mod thought it was an answer

Answer 5

The test for a link-only answer is: if you read it without the link, does it still contribute something?

Example: “See this link” → not an answer

Example: “RTFM! PIVOT” (where the question asks how to write a query using PIVOT) → not an answer

Example: “You need to construct a query with a PIVOT.” (where the question does not mention PIVOT) → this is a very partial answer, but an answer nonetheless. It informs the asker that PIVOT is the right tool for the job. It may be very low quality — it certainly is below the threshold where I'd post a comment (hint as to how to build an answer) rather than an answer — but it is an answer.

Answer 6

The flag was declined because the post actually attempted to answer the question.

You even said so yourself, it was a link-only answer.

"Not an answer" shouldn't be used for link-only answers.

It wasn't a good answer, and was only really useful if the person had no idea what the correct lingo for what they were trying to do, but it was an answer.

Moderators can not and should not become the judge of the 'quality' of an answer, so long as it is an answer. The community judges quality through upvotes and downvotes.

I don't believe the answer should have been deleted, because it is useful for people who don't know the lingo. whether it deserves any upvotes or not is not for me to say.