When to vote to delete an answer?

Question

I'm curious to know if there is a particular time to delete - or not delete - an answer that's clearly wrong?

Consider the first revision of https://unix.stackexchange.com/revisions/420788/1, which aside from a lack of formatting, contains a fragment of (presumably untested) code. The code attempts to answer the question so it's on topic, but it's incorrect in at least one significant way.

Ignoring the lack of formatting, I cannot find a text that explains whether to vote to delete such questions or accept it because it does attempt to answer the question.

• Accept and move on, knowing the answer is on topic but faulty
• Downvote and/or comment, and move on, knowing the answer is on topic but faulty
• Vote to delete, to try and clean up "wrong" answers
• Spend the time trying to fix what the author might have intended (potentially tricky without hitting the prohibition on changing the author's intent)

Answer 1

Well, it’s on another site’s meta (Stack Overflow), but You're doing it wrong: A plea for sanity in the Low Quality Posts queue, written by a moderator, with over 200 votes and minimal dissent, says that wrong answers should be downvoted (ideally with a comment) and not deleted.  And it is an amplification of Your answer is in another castle: when is an answer not an answer?, which is on the main Meta, is written by a moderator / community manager, and has over 500 votes.

If the answer is wrong but very close (i.e., a good approach but with a typo), it’s probably OK to edit it.

Answer 2

When considering whether to delete an answer, I tend to follow the available deletion reasons:

• commentary on the question or other answers
• asking another, different question
• “thanks!” or “me too!” responses
• exact duplicates of other answers
• barely more than a link to an external site
• not even a partial answer to the actual question

(Note though that the help centre doesn’t present this as an exhaustive list...)

In this instance, the answer given was

Maybe this will work, curl URL > /path || tar -xvf /path/file.tar.bz or whatever is the extension

Importantly in my assessment, it had a comment,

The || is a logical 'or' operator. It will cause the tar command to only be executed if the curl command returns a failure exit code. I asw your answer only because I offered to help new contributors to this site by offering advice, so I guess the advice would be to try out your answer before posting it. You may have meant to use the logical 'and' operator &&.

The answer is really just a comment in my book: it’s tentatively suggesting a solution, without much effort. However deleting it would drop the comment, and the writer would be unlikely to learn anything from the exercise...

To answer your question, I think the correct reaction to incorrect answers which are actually answers (unlike the one we’re discussing here) is either to edit them and salvage them, or to downvote them, perhaps with a comment, and move on. Trying to delete incorrect answers is tempting, but it’s a slippery slope.

Answer 3

I think an answer that provides some code or command as a solution should also provide either of:

1. An explanation of what the code does, or
2. An explanation of why the author thinks that code will work

Without either of these, an inexperienced visitor to that answer has little hope of correcting or even spotting mistakes in the code. Experienced people could correct the code, but they may not be able to tell the author where they went wrong, which could be in multiple places.

We have enough sites on the internet filling up with posts that go "maybe try this [one-liner/100-line monstrosity without comments]" without any explanation as to why I should try it.

Answer 4

I'll vote to delete a bad answer that comes up in the review queue if it's dangerously wrong and either unfixable or if whoever answered it shows no inclination to fix it. I probably wouldn't flag it for deletion myself unless it also met one of the other deletion criteria.

I'm unlikely to edit the answer to fix it unless it was a very trivial error, a typo or similar.

I'm even less likely to edit a command-only answer (whether correct or not) to add an explanation. The boundary between "helping" and "subverting authorial intent" is far too blurred.

If the question or topic was interesting to me (and if none of the existing answers covered ground I thought was important), I'd be more inclined to write my own answer where I could write whatever I liked without having to be concerned about what the original author intended. If it wasn't interesting, I'd either vote to delete or click on "Skip".

BTW, I don't think that even a great comment on a really bad answer is a good enough reason to not delete the answer. Comments are ephemeral, even highly-upvoted comments, and some readers don't read comments (or explanations) anyway - they just see something easy to cargo-cult into their shell.