Inexperienced users commenting on questions they don't understand

Question

Lately I have come across several answers and comments from a user, that doesn't seem to understand the questions, often gives rather bogus suggestions and generally shows not-so-great fluency in a lot of topics he's responding to (he's got some nice answers though).

Now, I understand that everybody has a different degree of knowledge and enthusiasm and sometimes these two don't meet at the best spot, but the answers/comments I'm talking about basically just generate noise and might be even confusing for the asker or casual visitor. What is the right way of telling such a user to hold his horses and only reply when he's reasonably convinced he's right? I don't want to dissuade him from contributing, but sometimes he just seems not to even understand how wrong he is.

Answer 1

U&L is a paltform for learning. I think the best approach is to downvote and leave a comment that addresses any factual errors, thereby providing the well-meaning but misinformed poster with an opportunity to increase their understanding and also alerting any other visitor to the page that the answer is erroneous and why.

The second point is important because often seeing how an incorrect answer is wrong is just as helpful in understanding an issue as a correct answer is. What matters most is that there is a very clear delineation between the two.

Hopefully, over time, the hapless poster will find their niche on the site. Irrespective of that happening, the overall quality of the site will improve with both correct answers and well annotated wrong ones.

Of course, if the answer is egregiously wrong and contains potentially harmful or damaging material—or it is just completely irrelevant, it should just be flagged for deletion. Not every wrong answer is worth making into an exemplar to avoid or learn from.

Answer 2

I think the idea behind the StackExchange format is that downvotes should deal with eliminating the noise.

If an answer is not getting the downvotes it deserves, it would be nice to have a way to attract the attention of other high-rep users.

Is there a way for a user to mark an answer for review by the community?

Answer 3

There are a lot of "experienced" users that are not knowledgeable and give incorrect answers. The voting system on SE sites is not perfect but is intended to help that (although I do think downvotes should be weighted equal to upvotes, also you cannot downvote comments).

Some of the things you can do about it are the following:

• Trust that if the reader does take incorrect information as correct, eventually at some point down the line, they will realize it was incorrect and all will be right again.
• Politely explain in a follow-up comment why the information is incorrect. If your explanation is effective, a reader will be able to discern for themselves what is correct and what is not.
• Downvote if possible, not to "punish" the offender, but to indicate to other readers that the information may not be valid.

One thing that I think is easy to forget is that while a reader may not be knowledgeable on a subject, they are still a human with at least some ability to either make their own conclusions, or learn later that their conclusions were incorrect. Too often we try to convince the person who made the incorrect statement that they are wrong, and completely forget that a reader may not need as much convincing.

So I would say, point out the mistake (in an effective way), let it slide (don't spend time arguing), and trust other readers to be the judge. In the worst case, a reader may have the wrong idea for a while, and eventually they will make their own observations that challenge what they read in the past.

In general, the internet is full of misinformation and it is an unfortunate but unavoidable consequence of the social freedom it provides.