What is a low quality answer?

Question

Following on from a similar question I posted the other day - I've had a bunch of Helpful Flags and some which were Declined. I've also two which are Disputed. They were raised against answers by other users for being low quality, but I disputed them as the description for answers like that is:

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

The first was for this post and the second for a low quality answer on this post. I chose to dispute them as I felt that even though the answers were very low quality, they could be salvaged. But is there/should there be a grace period on this?

These are both relatively recent answers. A month from now, if there is no further updates to them, then I would have no hesitation flagging them up as being far too low quality.

What exactly are the guidelines for when an answer is "low quality"? Should any awful answer that in some way (even if it's heavily opinionated) provides some form of answer be left open, given that it could be improved? Currently, that's what I'm trying to do, leaving a comment (and if not a new user a downvote), but I'd love some opinions on this.

Answer 1

Low quality means that an answer is unsalvageable ..... barely legible garbage to my understanding.

You gain a disputed flag when another user with access to the moderation tools doesn't agree with your flag. Doesn't mean it was declined yet as that needs several users (or one mod) to reject it.

You can however also gain a disputed flag where a post marked as low quality is edited - as this shows that perhaps its not as unsalvageable as you may have indicated. There's more information on this here:

What is a disputed flag?

Again, you are doing the right thing in my opinion - very low quality is probably lower than you imagine. We make a very unfriendly place if we delete other people's posts because they don't fall into our high standards. We should reward and up-vote excellence, not delete marginally bad answers.

There are some great guidelines on Meta StackOverflow when you should edit or delete an answer, and the bar for deletion is surprisingly high (reprinted here):

• If the post is rude or offensive [possibly flag]
• [QUES] If the question has been closed for a while
• [ANS] If the answer asks another question
• [ANS] If an answer is actually a comment (such as asking for more info, thanks!, etc.) [possibly flag]
• [ANS] If the answer is incomprehensible and you are at least a bit familiar with the subject.
• [ANS] If the answer duplicates another, better answer to the same question (e.g. a link-only answer where another answer provides the same link with an explanation).
• [ANS] Is obvious spam (tries to sell you cheap sunglasses) [possibly flag].
• [ANS] Note that wrong answers should not be deleted: deletion is for answers that “aren't even wrong”.

I would also add, that as a site we have very low Answer-to-Question-Ratio - and I think this is partially due to a culture of flagging and deleting answers that are perhaps not as good as others. I'm not saying we should be encouraging any old answers, but I do this we should be allowing the best to rise to the top by voting up the good.