Unify “not an answer” and “very low quality” in a single “delete” flag

Question

The “not an answer” flag on answers is meant to be used when

This was posted as an answer, but it does not attempt to answer the question. It should possibly be an edit, a comment, another question, or deleted altogether.

The “very low quality” flag on answers is meant to be used when

This answer has severe formatting or content problems. This answer is unlikely to be salvageable through editing, and might need to be removed.

There's quite a bit of confusion between those two flags. I don't want to get into that debate here, so take this as a statement that there is confusion, not that it is confusing.

Low quality posts have a nice workflow: they are shown in a queue to all users with the “edit” (2k) privilege, who can pile on to delete the post or contest the flag. The voting system ensures that after enough reviewers have seen the post, either it will be deleted or the flag will be cleared. As a user reviewing low quality posts, my actions make a difference. As a moderator, I don't need to get involved.

There are a few bad things about the “low quality” workflow:

• As a reviewer, you have to decide between “Looks OK”, “Edit” and “Recommend Deletion” (or “Delete” if you have the appropriate privilege). “Looks OK” is somewhat confusing because it is the right choice for an altogether wrong answer, which should be downvoted but not deleted.
• As a user, when you cast the “very low quality” flag, you don't get to enter a reason. Reviewers in the low quality queue have to figure out on their own why the initial user cast the flag. (Sometimes the initial user leaves a comment which makes this clear, but not always.)

As for the “not an answer” flag, it's essentially brought to moderators, after a delay, except when it isn't.

Fundamentally, the “not an answer” flag and the “very low quality flag” say the same thing:

I think this answer should be deleted (either converted to a comment or removed altogether).

I can't think of any reason why certain types of answers that should be deleted should require different workflows. Given that the “not an answer” workflow is inconvenient and the “low quality” workflow is mostly good, I propose:

Replace “not an answer” and “very low quality” by a single “delete” flag, and use the current “low quality” workflow with minor modifications.

The modifications to the LQ workflow would be:

• Supply a reason for deletion. The primary purpose of this reason is to explain what are reasons to delete an answer. We have close reasons, we should have delete reasons too. A secondary reason is to provide a clue to reviewers.
• Reword the “Looks OK” button.

A delete vote on an answer would kick it into the deletion queue with a score of 1 in the “delete” column.

Possible modifications, which may be done at the same time or later based on experience (which should perhaps be separate discussions):

• Allow voting in the low quality deletion review queue, which would help reviewers figure out what to do on altogether wrong answers.
• Tweak the deletion reasons to cover cases where one would use “not an answer” but not “low quality” today. The reasons should handle common cases, for the rare cases there's the “other” flag.
• Allow voting or flagging for conversion to a comment (which would be one of the deletion reason, offering a choice the question and the answers like voting to mark as duplicate offers existing questions).

I don't know whether there should be a score threshold for delete flags like there is for VLQ (but not NAA) today. On the one hand, the occasional joke or duplicate answer sometimes has a high score. On the other hand, the vast majority of posts that need deleting have a low score and exceptional cases can be handled by moderators.

(Similar request on Meta Stack Overflow)

Answer 1

I rarely see any content that really is VLQ-flaggable anyway.

There is a thin region between spam and OK (not good, just not deletable) answers that we term as "very low quality", and answers in that region are rarely found.

A post is "very low quality" if it has problems that can't be fixed by others. I find that something that tries to be an answer can almost always be fixed. The unfixable ones are:

• Those which are not really attempting to answer the question: The ones which answer a different question, or are a comment, or are a different question. These can be safely flagged as Not an Answer or for comment conversion.
• Spam: Flag as spam, obviously
• Wrong answers: These aren't supposed to be deleted anyway
• Incomplete answers: Sometimes incomplete answers answer the question or provide sufficient hints to the OP and don't need deletion. Sometimes they are too incomplete, and can be deleted as not an answer. (usually leaving a comment telling the OP to repost a complete answer)
• For questions, the close flags are sufficient.

So I don't really see any place for VLQ to fit in here. On Physics I just get people using VLQ to mean NAA, or to mean "this should be a comment".

The only thing that the VLQ flag adds is clarity. The words "very low quality" are pretty clear, and someone looking at the flag dialog can easily pick out that the flag is for flagging obvious crap. Contrast this with "not an answer", which is clear, but not so clear for newbies.

I would say that merging NAA with whatever little independent meaning the VLQ flag has is a good idea.

Possibly it might be good to reshuffle the flags, create one flag that is solely for converting to comment, and one flag for "useless post that should be deleted".

Answer 2

For rewording the "Looks OK" button, why don't we rename it "Shouldn't be Deleted", "Not Deleteable", or "Don't Delete"? That would make it clear that ALL of the following are "good" answers with respect to the Low Quality Posts queue (that is, they shouldn't be deleted):

• Correct and useful answers
• Incorrect answers (e.g. 'Strings are mutable in Java, just call myString.updateTo("newValue");' or 'Dereferencing a null pointer in C always returns zero')
• Answers that are technically correct, but are so incomplete or vague that they are not useful (e.g. "You need to add a spline" or "Rewrite your second section, the error is on line 5").
• Answers that you can't tell whether they are correct or not, but you can tell that an attempt was made to answer the question

Another possible wording would be "Attempts to Answer the Question".

Any of these would emphasize that "OK", from the perspective of the Low Quality Posts queue, means something very specific and not a general answer quality value judgment made from the reviewer's prior experience with the subject(s).

Answer 3

No. "Not an answer" is more of a hint that a mod could convert the answer to a comment. This is not appropriate in the "low quality" case.