Why was this Very Low Quality flag declined?

Question

I have always felt that the criteria for the use of the Very Low Quality flag are fuzzy, confusing, and ultimately wrong, and I recently had a VLQ flag declined that I would like some clarifications on.

The answer in question is this one, which I'll quote as an image in case it is deleted.

I think the question, Why opposite poles of magnet attract each other, why don't they repel?, is relatively poor to begin with, but depending on your perspective, this answer is either (i) a load of waffle with very little to do with the question, (ii) a push for a non-mainstream personal theory, (iii) just plain wrong, or (iv) a load of waffle that doesn't even manage to mean much.

Either way, I find that this answer is in active detriment to the site, and it needs to be downvoted and deleted relatively quickly. As such, a VLQ flag is precisely the thing to put this answer in front of review-minded individuals with independent perspectives and a handy Recommend Deletion button that can remove bad content when acted upon.

I therefore did just that, and I flagged it as VLQ. The reviewers apparently agreed with me, giving it three Recommend Deletion votes to one Looks OK.

However, despite the reviewers agreeing with the flag, it still got declined with the usual

declined - flags should not be used to indicate technical inaccuracies, or an altogether wrong answer.

I really, really, really don't get this. The flag text reads

it is very low quality

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

and the answer ticks all the boxes. It is definitely very low quality, it has severe content problems, it cannot be salvaged without a complete re-do, and as it stands it needs to be removed. A VLQ flag is the organic mechanism we have to deal with content that's so bad that it needs to be removed.

Moreover, it seems that I am currently banned from raising that specific kind of flag, partly from this incident and a VLQ flag on this answer, which received a single review that also agreed with the flag.

So, I have a number of questions.

• Procedurally, how did these two flags come to be declined even though reviewers agreed with them? Since both reviews are incomplete (not enough Recommend Deletion votes to delete, but not enough Looks OK votes to kick it out of the queue) I imagine it was manually handled by a disagreeing mod.

• However, if moderators are going through VLQ flags, what's the point of the review queue? Or are there clear signs that the VLQ queue is not coping with its job and moderators need to step in and do the community's job for it?

• How are those two answers at all content we want to remain on the site? How do those answers and users contribute anything but a bad image in the eyes of a prospective expert who's looking for a cool place with interesting questions to answer? What reason is there that changes the response away from "delete them as fast as a consensual community process will be able to process them"?

• Taking as a premise that they do need to be deleted, what review mechanism other than the VLQ queue does this community have available to keep the site clean from detrimental posts like these?

• Is the site still at a stage that community moderation (particularly at the 2k+ level) cannot cope with things like this and explicit moderator intervention is needed at every stage, even after the mods explicitly stepped back from going through the Close review queue because the reviewer traffic was high enough?

• Conversely, is the site mature enough, and with a strong enough 20k+ population, that direct votes to delete are sufficient to handle posts like this?

• What is it that compels us to make available to the world posts like these, even after they've been judged by the community to be somewhere between plain wrong and intentionally misleading? When posting users license their content to SE, give it permission to host it, and ask it politely to do so. There is nothing that compels us or SE to keep wrong content on our walls.

• If flags are not meant to handle "technical inaccuracies", what on Earth does "severe content problems" even mean?

I appreciate that there is a lot of inertia here, and that there is some amount of general guidance that emanates from the Stack Exchange team and broader community, and that some of our moderators take this guidance very explicitly to heart. However, I do not think that the answer to any of the above questions should be "because SE says so". That's just intentionally crippling the community moderation mechanisms without any amount of critical analysis.

Instead, we need to recognize that the flagging and reviewing mechanisms are tools provided by Stack Exchange to multiple communities, that they need to be uniform to keep the development process manageable, and that they therefore need to take a very general form that is able to serve over 130 different sites with different requirements. However, these are still only tools, and it is up to us to find the ways and community processes to use these tools that work for us as a site, and that respond to the unique pressures that this site is under.

In particular, this includes crackpot answers (particularly the lower tier, the ones for which "non-mainstream" is a stretched compliment) that only serve to make this site look unattractive to prospective experts. We have a software tool (VLQ flags then queue) that enables us to efficiently clean these up as a community without unilateral action. What is there, beyond blind SE dogma, that forces us to shoot ourselves in the foot and disable this tool from use?

Sorry for the long rant, but I really don't see it. Rant aside, I really am interested in the answers to the questions above.

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Edit, just to have a clear tl;dr proposal:

• Answers which are (i) flat-out incorrect, (ii) so completely incorrect that no amount of editing can make them useful or constructive, and (iii) so completely incorrect that they are actively harmful to the site and its standing, should be flagged as VLQ, which then feeds directly to the Low Quality Posts queue. There, if people agree with that three-point assessment, they should vote Recommend Deletion (or, if 20k+, Delete). Flags should sit there for X hours (where X is much bigger than 1/4), and should only be handed over to the moderator review queue after that time, or if there is obvious conflict in the review outcomes.

Answer 1

I agree, the very low quality flag is currently somewhere between useless and horribly confusing. Not only I agree, several posts on meta.SE also agree:

• Remove VLQ as a flag option, top answer says should be removed for questions, and renamed just "delete" on answers - which I think would be even more useless, considering we do not delete answers that are not either "not an answer" or flaggable as offensive/spam. Shog9's answer has an interesting bit on the purpose of the low quality flag:

  See, back in 2011, folks were posting a lot of really terrible stuff. Not exactly nonsense mind you; just... Embarrassingly-bad questions and answers. Stuff that wasn't even wrong so much as just... Annoying. Txt-speak explanations that don't explain anything. Code-only answers where the code isn't formatted and also is copied directly from the question. Questions that are copied from an assignment somewhere, with a few round-trips through a machine translation service en route. Stuff that, given infinite time and patience and clairvoyance could maybe be fixed, but in practice just saps the energy of everyone reading and makes us long for the quality and clarity we used to have over on Yahoo! Answers.

• Rename “Very low quality” in “unintelligible”, only answer says "rename to delete".

• Is the “very low quality” flag necessary?, top voted answer says

  A bad/incorrect answer or an answer that's difficult to understand can still answer the question, albeit badly. I don't think "not an answer" the same as "very low quality" at all.

So, in summary, most people seem to agree that either "very low quality" should mean posts like the ones you are flagging - posts that technically try to answer the question, but horribly fail at providing anything useful to the reader - or should be abolished. I'll now address a point DavidZ makes in his answer:

Very low quality is not needed for gibberish posts. Shog9 explicitly recommends flagging gibberish as "rude or abusive", and "not an answer" would apply equally well to gibberish. If "Can I read this: Yes/No" is the criterion for acception/declining low quality flags, there is truly no point to this flag.

And reading Shog9's description of what the low quality flag was created for, it's explicitly for posts that are not gibberish, but nevertheless so worthless they do not deserve to be hosted on this site. Now, you may say that "downvotes" are there to fix that. But downvotes do not fix that, in particular when the post is written in correct English but contains no information of value - it still gets upvoted by someone, and it takes five downvotes against one upvote to even make that a zero sum game. It is perfectly possible (and it happens!) to get net positive reputation just by posting garbage.

Now, there's still a case to be made that we shouldn't, on the grounds of some imagined fairness, vote to delete answers that try to answer the question just because of our judgement of their content. But when I read crackpots pushing their personal theories, answers that have no grounding in physics whatsoever, I cannot help but thinking that the mission statement of StackExchange is "The best answers rise to the top", not "Even the worst answer is here for your convenience".

Maybe it is not a moderator's place to pass such judgement on the content of answer (although I would not have a problem with that). But it should be the community's place to pass judgement on bad answers, and yes, even decide that they do not deserve a space in this community and should be deleted. So my idea would be that low quality flags should not be declined by moderators if they are not obviously cast in bad faith for some reason, but if the moderator in question doesn't feel they have the right to unanimously validate the flag, they should just refrain from acting on it. Let the review queue do its job. Because, in many cases, I have found that the community rather unanimously decides to get rid of obvious crackpottery and stuff that is so wrong as to be unsalvagable.

If this is not at all the intended way the VLQ flag and its review queue should be used, then the flag option needs to be removed, since currently it is effectively used that way unless a moderator manually declines the flag.

Answer 2

Maybe this is splitting hairs, but while I do not agree there should be a "this answer is wrong" flag (or use of the VLQ flag for this purpose) I do agree with part of Emilio's sentiment—there should be a flag called "non-mainstream physics answer" similar to the one we have for questions.

Incorrectness = handle with downvotes.
Crackpottery = handle with flags (and downvotes).

Answer 3

Let me address the root of the problem first: the criteria for using a Very Low Quality flag, at least as far as the moderators are concerned (currently), are laid out in Which flag do I use for an inappropriate post?

The "very low quality" flag is for answers which are complete nonsense, such as

• incoherent gibberish
• anything not parseable as English text
• answers posted in another language (although if you can edit in a translation, you're encouraged to do so instead of flagging)

When a VLQ flag appears in the moderator flag queue, my thought process is basically "Can I read this? Yes: decline/No: accept". The answer in question is certainly readable, and I think we would agree that it does not meet the criteria quoted above. Its main problem is that it's wrong. That calls for it to be downvoted, but not flagged. If it were to be deleted by three delete votes from non-moderators, that wouldn't be the worst thing, but a VLQ flag is meant to indicate that something is so obviously worthless that it deserves swift and ruthless deletion, even from a moderator.

So now let me address your individual points:

• Procedurally, how did these two flags come to be declined even though reviewers agreed with them? Since both reviews are incomplete (not enough Recommend Deletion votes to delete, but not enough Looks OK votes to kick it out of the queue) I imagine it was manually handled by a disagreeing mod.

Yep, I checked and I'm the one who declined both those flags. (It shouldn't matter who exactly did it, but I'm just saying you're getting the closest thing to an authoritative answer here.) This was done from the moderator flag queue, not from the low-quality review queue.

• However, if moderators are going through VLQ flags, what's the point of the review queue? Or are there clear signs that the VLQ queue is not coping with its job and moderators need to step in and do the community's job for it?

As described in this MSE question, if VLQ flags sit in their own queue for 15 minutes without being handled by the community, they are then added into the moderator flag queue. When the flags appear in the mod queue, we don't get any information about whether they are under review by the community or what the status of that review is; we only know that they have been sitting around for a certain amount of time and the community hasn't handled them.

One could take this as a sign that the VLQ queue is not doing its job, but it could also be the case that 15 minutes is too short to reflect the activity level for this site. This was discussed in the comments on that post, so I'd point you there for further reading.

• How are those two answers at all content we want to remain on the site? How do those answers and users contribute anything but a bad image in the eyes of a prospective expert who's looking for a cool place with interesting questions to answer? What reason is there that changes the response away from "delete them as fast as a consensual community process will be able to process them"?

As I said, the biggest problem with these answers is that they are wrong. We already have a mechanism to distinguish right from wrong, namely voting. This takes into account that reasonable people often disagree on what is correct and what is not. If we additionally use flags to enforce consequences on wrong answers, that puts each individual moderator in the position of deciding right from wrong, and that's really not what we're here for.

• Taking as a premise that they do need to be deleted, what review mechanism other than the VLQ queue does this community have available to keep the site clean from detrimental posts like these?

Well, as I've said I disagree with the premise. I think the system is designed the way it is for a reason: there is no other review mechanism for posts like these precisely because the site doesn't need to be kept clean from such posts.

• Is the site still at a stage that community moderation (particularly at the 2k+ level) cannot cope with things like this and explicit moderator intervention is needed at every stage, even after the mods explicitly stepped back from going through the Close review queue because the reviewer traffic was high enough?

• Conversely, is the site mature enough, and with a strong enough 20k+ population, that direct votes to delete are sufficient to handle posts like this?

Here I think you have a point. While I would always like to see more high-rep users active in moderation, I do think the community is capable of handling most of its own moderation, and it might be useful to tweak the thresholds of the review system so that flags aren't bumped up to the moderator queue so quickly. This would require a bit of data analysis on flag handling times, but if people are agreed on that conclusion, we could make a request to the SE team to change the thresholds.

• What is it that compels us to make available to the world posts like these, even after they've been judged by the community to be somewhere between plain wrong and intentionally misleading? When posting users license their content to SE, give it permission to host it, and ask it politely to do so. There is nothing that compels us or SE to keep wrong content on our walls.

Of course, nothing compels us to host this kind of content. But again, the tricky part is deciding which content is worthy of hosting and which content is not, and in particular, who makes that decision. Like I said, individual moderators shouldn't be expected to distinguish right from wrong. A consensus of high-rep users is better equipped to do it, but still, the main mechanism to indicate wrongness is by voting, not deletion.

• If flags are not meant to handle "technical inaccuracies", what on Earth does "severe content problems" even mean?

It means stuff like "jasfoijaw3fjpawejfp0awjefp0asj0pfoajks09ojk3meosoifmasd". (Yes, we do get posts like that.) Things that you can't even read. "Severe content problems" doesn't refer to the content being wrong, it refers to the content being unintelligible. The sort of thing that any competent English speaker, whether or not they have any knowledge of physics, would be unable to make sense of.