Asian movie about a guy recording sounds and sending them to his girlfriend
Here is my example. The question is decent but the answer is basically it's called ___ and it's from this country. Yet 7 people considered that a response that needed more points. I think it basically validates and does nothing to discourage people that leave the minimum information.
The fact of the matter is, the up/down vote options are there and no one is stopping anyone from using them. The only thing that can be done is for the mods to comment on it (I don't personally like editing it, even though we can as it is too heavy of a modification) and for others to downvote. If people want to upvote it enough and there are no flags against the answer, there is no valid reason to delete/edit it.
It only further shows that this site is community driven. If the community rewards this, then people won't learn. If the community flags and downvotes, it shows that it is unacceptable and people will learn that way. Sure downvoting an answer comes at a cost of a whopping -1 rep, it is a further consequence for the answerer, as well as this rep lost by downvoting is easily made up by suggesting an edit and having it approved (it results in a +1 gain)
Also, as my fellow mods have pointed out, the question and answer were both from when the site was merely a week old, therefore upvotes abound to encourage people to post more Q&A on the site.
Ok, the answer you highlight was posted on December 8 - only a few days into the beta. People were a little more 'upvote happy' then than they are now. If you look back, in the first few days of the site, some questions got voted up far more than they really deserved.
Often the moderators will prompt someone to add to an answer like this, but we can't force people. An answer like this is better than no answer at all, so we won't delete it.
If you think an answer is undeserving of its score - it is up to the community to downvote it.
I completely agree. A few thinsg to keep in mind though is that:
There is a prod from @Tylershads for more info, but the user hasn't been on since January. Another person, knowledgable about this answer, could edit the answer with more info.
I would downvote it, but alas I was one of those that voted too candidly in the private beta.
I'm generally a major promoter of long, detailed answers (browse through my profile on a few sites if you have doubts), and I do agree that it's all too common here to have insufficient answers that are highly upvoted, but you didn't pick a good example. This is a movie identification question, and finding the name of the movie is the hard part. It's better if the answer explains how the proposed movie fits the description, but the answer is ok without it. It's not like, say, a question about a plot point where a thorough explanation is a must.
