How can I determine the validity of answers on this site, meta.stackexchange.com?

Question

I'm having some trouble judging the validity of some answers on Meta Stack Exchange; that is, gauging whether an answer should be interpreted as official policy or not.

For example, let's say somebody asks how to correctly moderate something, and several different answers are posted. One answer is accepted, another answer has the most votes, and neither the asker nor answerer have a moderator badge near their name.

So, should answers on Meta Stack Exchange which are "accepted", or maybe which have the most score, be highly regarded or be treated as official policy?

The case which induced me to ask this is What to do when all answers to a question are wrong because of a misinterpretation of the question?; the accepted answer has 4 votes, but there are 2 other answers with 1 vote each, and no poster there has a moderator badge.

Answer 1

So, does such answers, "accepted", or maybe with most score, here have any high or official status?

No. The only posts with an official status here are those with a Policy Lock. Other than that, it's best to look at the post score; a post with a high score means the community at large found it useful, rather than just the question author.

no poster there has moderator's diamond mark.

There are only four moderators here, apart from some staff members which also wield diamonds. Our function is not to provide definitive answers to questions; in fact, we're just as fallible as other users. There are almost 100k questions here, you can't expect the majority of them to be answered by a handful of users (nor would that be healthy). Also, answers may have been provided by former staff members / moderators; would that mean they are not 'valid' anymore?

Bottom line: to judge whether an answer is good or not, please check its score and/or apply common sense. If it's answered by this user, it's bound to be good.

Answer 2

An asker can "accept" any answer they like. Taken to the extreme: I can accept the answer that totally misses the point because due to that I learned how to solve my problem. That blatantly wrong answer helped me the most. Unlikely it happens often but nothing forbids I use my accept vote that way.

Answers here are meant to be guidance, written by community members for community members. There is no difference here between users, moderators or SE staff. You can do what you want with the given advice, adhere to it, mend it a bit for your own case, ignore it.

There are a few Q/A's that have slightly more prescriptive guidance and that are those tagged with faq. They capture the overall community consensus on how certain aspects of the site should be used or what approach is expected by all of us from the community at large. Still, most posts are by all kind of users and any FAQs written by SE staff often just summarizes what has been established by the community in the previous 6 to 8 weeks. You better not interpret FAQ posts too much for your own liking, just try to stick to the guidance offered.

The question that are SE staff only are those tagged announcement but they can still have answers from users. Only on posts with a Policy Lock you can be 100% sure that is SE staff territory.

We are all held by the Code of Conduct.

Diamond moderators don't get to set the rules. They work with the community that elected them to be a janitor within the rules painted by the community. And communities evolve, painting new rules, color outside the lines.

We all use our common sense to build together the body of knowledge each site, even this meta site, wants to be. Read questions and answers and apply their intent in your daily use of the site as well as in the interaction with other users.

Answer 3

On this site you'll find other people just like yourself but who have maybe used the site a little more than most. That's generally the status answers have here, people trying to give you the benefit of their experience and opinions based on their usage of this site.

So if we agree with one of the answers we'll upvote it, if not we might downvote it or add our own answer if we want to make some other point. Just like any other site really.

Ultimately we work off an idea called the wisdom of crowds i.e. if we all agree that something is a good idea as evidenced by a question getting a high score then it's probably the way you should go too. If we all disagree and the answer therefore has a low score then maybe avoid doing that. Otherwise maybe nobody really knows what to do, some questions really don't have an obvious right or wrong answer.

Occasionally you will get Stack Exchange Staff chiming in and perhaps their answers should be given more weight. You'll find they have Staff after their names in their user cards.

Even more rarely some questions or answers may be locked with a policy lock, they are the stated policy of Stack Exchange. Those do have official status and a mark to prove it.