Let's get aligned on our site specific usage of the Not an Answer flag

Question

We have, on this site, had some confusion/differing opinions on the matter of when a Not an Answer flag is applicable. Specifically, when someone posts something related that isn't actually an answer to the question.

It may attempt to answer (but doesn't actually give an answer). It may provide some relevant info. But... I wouldn't say that it actually provides a real answer to the question asked.

The point of this meta question is to determine whether or not such answers fall under the Not an Answer flag.

Some previous examples: (1) (2) (3)

What we can take away from those questions is that people disagree about whether or not an attempt to answer the question, even if it does not address the actual question asked, qualifies for a Not an Answer flag.

Shog9 seems to think that attempting doesn't cut it. That if it doesn't actually answer the question... well, don't go cherry picking the description. See also this comment.

But what does the Scifi.SE community think? Should we be using Not an Answer flags for answers that attempt to answer but don't actually provide an answer, no matter what the network wide policy (which can be overridden by individual community consensus), or not?

_{I'm aware of How do we handle answers that don't answer the question?; but see the voting on the answers there. That, in addition to the fact that that post is from 2012, prompted me to open this up for discussion again.}

Answer 1

As Shog9 notes:

That said, there's a change I would love to see to this flag text, that might make some small difference here: stop using the word "answer" to refer to both the post itself and the action of addressing the asker's problem:

This was posted as an answer, but it does not address the problem being asked about. It should possibly be an edit, a comment, another question, or deleted altogether.

And then couple that more explicitly to the default decline reason by rewording that as well:

this answer appears to address the asker's problem. Use downvotes to indicate inaccurate or entirely wrong answers. For subtle forms of abuse, choose "other" and explain the problem in detail.

I think the combination of these two changes would serve to reduce a lot of the confusion surrounding these flags, without greatly changing the implied purpose.

I thoroughly agree with Shog9 here. An answer is not just a post that takes the shape of an answer, an answer actually tries to answer the question by addressing the question.
As I've said elsewhere:

If an answer just goes off on a tangent [or if] an answer is clearly based on just the title, ignoring the body of the question [then] the answer does not address the actual question and should be flagged as Not an Answer.

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An answer should address the question and try to answer it meaningfully. It should address the actual question and not just its title and it should answer it, not just spew some lines that could possibly be related to it.

If it does not, it is not an answer and should be flagged as such.

Yes, we can down vote and vote to delete, but that option is only available to high reputation users. We should encourage users that haven't reached 20k yet to participate in site moderation and we can do so by allowing them to flag answers such as these as Not an Answer.

Answer 2

an attempt to answer the question, even if it does not address the actual question asked

This seems like an oxymoron to me. If it doesn't address the question asked, how can it attempt to answer the question? Perhaps the confusion here simply arises from people talking at cross-purposes? I'll try to provide some illustrative examples, but I'm not sure how well I'll be able to choose them, so do leave comments if you can think of better example answers and I'll edit them in. (This kind of debate works best with concrete examples, IMO, otherwise it's hard to tell whether everyone means the same thing by vague phrases like "attempt to answer" or "does not address".)

• "Why did Character do Thing in Story?" - "Dunno if she had any reason - maybe she just felt like it." This might potentially be VLQ, but it's not NaA because it does provide a (probably bad) answer to the question. The correctness and quality of this answer should be judged by votes.

• "Which characters did Thing in Story?" - "I know that So-and-so did, because [...]." This is also not NaA, because it provides a partial answer to the question. It may be useful to the OP, or to someone else in compiling a full answer.

• "What happened to Character after Event?" - "He was doing this, that, and the other before Event happened." This is NaA, because it doesn't address the actual question asked. It's only an "attempt to answer" in the sense that anything typed into the answer box is.

• "What is the origin of Idea?" - "It's mentioned in Source." This one is borderline. On the one hand, it could be an attempt to answer by providing a possible origin; on the other hand, it could just be a comment about one instance of the idea without even thinking it might be the first. As a mod, if I saw a NaA flag on this, I'd probably leave it to be handled by community review.

Again, please comment if you can think of more useful example answers to be evaluated. The more concrete examples we can discuss, the more helpful this discussion will be.

In particular, if the OP or anyone else can provide an example of an answer which "attempts to answer the question" without "addressing the actual question asked" or "actually providing an answer", I'd very much like to see what actually falls within this grey area of apparent dispute. It's hard to have an opinion on a category of answers if you can't think of anything which might be in that category :-)

Answer 3

Perhaps we should look to Stack Overflow for inspiration:

Every once in a while, which some regularity, somebody on SO completely misreads a question (or is just generally confused or insane or on drugs, or whatever) and posts an answer that has absolutely nothing to do with the question. If you've been on SO for a while, you've probably seen something like this — a user asks:

Is i += f(++i); undefined behavior in C++?

and someone responds:

You need to use jQuery.click() on the checkbox.

[The question then goes on to explain that these aren't flaggable, but do tend to get a lot of declined NAA flags, and proposes changing the flag interface to discourage people from flagging such answers.]

-- Meta Stack Overflow

So, in other words, SO's policy is very simple: If it looks like an answer, it is an answer, no matter how ridiculous it may in fact be. The NAA flag is then relegated to, for the most part, new users who mistakenly use the answer box for something other than an answer ("thanks", "me too", "what about X?", etc., basically the same stuff that protecting a question is supposed to block). It also sees some use for clearing out link-only answers, especially when highly upvoted by well-meaning users. But that's about it; you can't NAA-flag an answer that looks like an answer, even if it's answering a different question entirely!

This rule has the advantage that their moderators do not need to know anything about the broad range of technologies which are on-topic at Stack Overflow. It is also very straightforward to evaluate and does not tend to generate endless arguments over whether or not an answer "addresses" the problem. A major disadvantage is that answers which are truly irrelevant cannot be flagged; they must be downvoted and then delete-voted instead. In my opinion, this is an acceptable tradeoff: I very rarely see contentious arguments over flag handling on MSO, and SO has enough experienced users on the larger tags that these answers don't last very long anyway. I believe these principles also apply to SFF (in particular, our site moderation is far too politicized right now, IMHO). Therefore:

I propose we adopt Stack Overflow's policy verbatim. Anything which looks like an answer should not be flagged as NAA, even if blatantly irrelevant to the question. Use downvotes and delete-votes instead.

Ridiculous answers are, of course, ridiculous, and should continue to be downvoted and deleted. The only thing that would change is that moderators would step back and let the community do those things on their own.