We aren't doing our jobs

Question

One of the most important jobs we do here is to vote on answers. Good answers are meant to be upvoted and bad ones downvoted. The primary reason for this is so that learners who come here looking for reliable information will know which answers contain reliable information, and which ones contain untrue or false information.

Now, there are many reasons to downvote answers. You may want to downvote an answer because it is too short, does not give a clear explanation or because you feel that that particular answer needs references.

However, it is our absolute DUTY to downvote answers which contain wrong information. Otherwise this site will be doing harm to learners instead of helping them.

There seem to be several answers recently that contain completely false information or give ungrammatical examples to readers, and which have not been edited even after the Original Posters have been advised of these problems. These questions badly need you to downvote them for the benefit of learners and of the site.

Please downvote wildly incorrect answers.

Answer 1

I agree that it's a civic duty to downvote or comment on bad/incorrect answers.

Still, I think your title seems a bit reactionary and alarmist. Just because the downvote totals on a few answers aren't accruing fast enough for your liking doesn't mean the community is failing to do their jobs. (On the other hand, if your question title was designed to be more of an attention-grabber than an indictment, then it was well-played).

Moreover, in a community of learners, not every regular is able to spot a "wildly incorrect answer." I wouldn't want to see your exhortation for more downvoting lead to a situation where the blind are leading the blind. We need to be careful; before we start downvoting too rabidly, we must ensure we can differentiate between a wildly incorrect answer and a mere difference in opinion.

With that all said, I have seen a few answers lately that I thought were dishing out some bad guidance. When used properly, downvotes are indeed a good way to ensure our community of learners won't get steered in a wrong direction.

Lastly, if you're a learner taking a stab at writing an answer, that's fine. However, if you start to get pushback from the community, be ready to learn a little more and correct or maybe even delete your answer. That's a better reaction than being defensive and entrenching yourself on the wrong side of correctness.

Answer 2

You know what annoys me more than this? Answers which are voted much higher than the associated questions. If it's a good answer, logically it should have been a good question, yes?

I get this isn't a community like Reddit where the votes are just fake Internet points. But almost everywhere on the SE site it seems people are extraordinarily chary with their upvotes, and liberal with their downvotes. What's the point of downvoting the bad answers when the good answers -- and often the great answers -- as well as the questions that inspire them, all lie fallow and unappreciated?

Here's an example: a verb to mean to start "not being on speaking terms"

I'm not saying that my answer should be chosen. Mick's is good. J.R.'s is good. The question itself is a great question, exactly the kind of thing you really can't look up in a dictionary, which rarely contains the kind of subtlety and nuance Yazdan is looking for, and which is best answered by a native speaker.

Shouldn't we encourage this kind of question by pouring votes on it?