What to do with answers that fall short of our standards of evidence?

Question

I've received a flag for the following answer:

My own personal experience: I learned about "sending energy" in massage school, and experimented with sending it to people I knew, just to see what would happen, and have gotten definite confirmation that they received it, never discussing with them that I sent them energy.

I have also heard many stories of people "knowing" something (usually "bad") happened to someone they knew at the instant it happened. I had 2 very definite moments of "knowing" (instead of "observing"), one of them completely innocuous, the 2nd a family member dying.

It is easy enough to do your own experiments with sending energy. The message may be delivered, the response you get may not be what you would expect--it is important to see if there is SOME response to the message sent, not if it's the response you were expecting.

Such an answer could be critiqued for many reasons. However, my question here concerns what is the appropriate action for a moderator:

1. Rely on downvoting: Do nothing and let down votes and comments operate as they are intended
2. Delete: Respond to the flag and delete the answer

More broadly, under what conditions should a moderator delete rather than rely on downvoting?

Initial thoughts

In relation to Spam, it is clear that we delete. However, in general I think we need to be careful of censorship in relation to answers that are provided in good faith. I think downvoting and comments provides a powerful mechanism to communicate disagreement with an answer.

Answer 1

Full disclosure; I flagged for deletion (with a note of "maybe 'citation needed'").

So there's two mod actions that are possible here: deleting the post and adding a "Citation Needed" post notice. These are in addition to the downvoting and commenting that the community can (and should) do when it finds wrong/pseudoscience answers.

Due to comments above, let me reaffirm that bad content should always be downvoted. Downvotes are good for the site! You should not "stop" when the score is 0; a score of -3 at the least shows an answer is "wrong" as the text fades out; if you're going to arbitrarily stop downvoting at least use that threshold. Downvotes are not rude.

All of these posts should get Citation needed, so I'm not going to argue about that.

When we should delete or not is touchy; I think people should be given the benefit of the doubt... when there's a reasonable chance their post could be supported by scientific evidence. Leave a citation needed notice and give them a chance to edit, sure.

But this isn't one of those answers. This is pseudoscience (at best) and is complete, laughable noise. If this isn't a joke it's extremely depressive. Pseudoscience and crap should not be allowed on our site. When an answer is so insanely outside of accepted science that it is unbelievable that the poster could rephrase their answer to include (valid) supporting the pseudoscience answer should be deleted. Leave a comment before you delete the post explaining the problem and delete it.

As an additional note, I am very annoyed that the user in question is gaining priviledges on a site for science with pseudoscience answers. The user has gained 24 rep in upvotes from untrue garbage. That's not something downvotes can prevent unless they're extremely disproportionate to upvotes. All it takes is a couple of cooks to break reputation here, so setting a strong precedent is important. If you can earn rep on this site by talking about chakras and sending energy and crystals the site is a joke. We can't let that happen.

If the poster actually has evidence, they can edit their answer and can flag it to be undeleted. Pseudoscience should be treated as if it were a complete non-answer, the standard procedure for which is to delete the post.

Also note these posters pretty clearly fail the Pee-Wee Herman Rule:

Does this user belong here on this site with us? Or is it the guy in the nerdy suit who just walked into the biker bar?

This is a site for professors, researchers and students of science. If your post doesn't sound like it came form one of those and it doesn't have any research at all to make it look like it might possibly stand up to objective scrutiny...it doesn't belong here.

As an addendum, let me quote the Citation Needed post notice (emphasis mine):

This post does not cite any references or sources. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed.

Sure, it's stolen from Wikipedia, but it does express that unsourced material may be challenged and removed. This is that challenge. It remains without a valid source. I will be so bold as to say it will never have a valid source. Thus the unsourced material (the whole post) should be removed.

Answer 2

I have given this issue quite a bit of thought and have had discussions with many other Stack Exchange users, some who are high-reputation and long time Meta Stack Overflow members, some who are community moderators on other sites, and some who are actually Stack Exchange employees.

It is my strong opinion that these posts should be dealt with as follows:

1. The posts should be downvoted heavily.
2. Constructive comments about why these posts are not welcome should be added. ("These answers are pseudo-science, this site expects answers backed by verifiable research", etc)
3. A "Citation Needed" post notification should be added. (Please do flag these answers and ask for a mod to do so)
4. The user should be warned via a private moderator message that their answers are attracting flags and downvotes, are low quality, and must be improved or their account may be answer-banned or suspended.
5. The answers should not be deleted by a moderator. If the author deletes the answer, this is an indication that they recanted and is acceptable (actually, desirable)

I know my view on this matter is extremely unpopular with many of the higher reputation members of this site. I do fully understand that as a community moderator it is my responsibility to act in the best interests of this community. As I am going against the popular opinion of the highest reputation users of this community, please allow me to explain why I feel that I am not "ignoring" the community views and why I feel I am acting in the community's best interests.

First, let me make it clear that I do not feel these answers are valid and I do not feel the are good answers. That being said, I am a long time user of the Stack Exchange system (starting on Stack Overflow on March 9th, 2009) and I believe that the score of answers on stack exchange sites is the greatest strength of this system. I feel these answers are bad, but the negative score next to the answers shows that they are bad.

Left on the site, these negative score answers show that they are incorrect and not welcomed on our site. If these answers were deleted, the message that they are not welcome here is deleted also. Some have said that new users do not understand the score. To this I say new users need to learn what the scores mean early! If you don't understand what the score next to posts n a Stack Exchange site is, you're not a useful user. Post scores are at the very core of our system!

Also, these answers should have many comments explaining what is wrong as well as a "Citation Needed" notice. It should be abundantly clear what the negative score means. These answers *should also have a competing positive score answer. If these answers are left alone, then they do gain credibility and deletion should be seriously considered. But I think it is abundantly clear when these answers compete with good, positive score answers that they are incorrect and that his site is showing they are incorrect.

This sort of bad information exists. People believe it and people spread it. By deleting it from our site we lose control over it! if we instead keep it on our site, we gain power over the bad information and we can demonstrate that it 8is not correct*. Deleting the information makes it appear that we are somehow frighted by it, at least in my view.

The other major argument I have heard is that somehow these users posting bad information will accrue massive reputation and will somehow take over the site. I can't see this happening; if this were to happen we have a much more serious issue. If this is the concern than deleting the content is simply sweeping the problem under the rug.

Firstoff, these users should by far be the minority. The users posting good information should easily be able to overwhelm the bad users and downvote the answers into oblivion. The only users upvoting bad answers should be other bad users, which constitues a voting ring and is grounds for suspension and automatic vote reversal.

Second, there are lots of users on lots of Stack Exchange sites that upvote crap. There are sympathy upvotes, incorrect upvotes, etc. As a community we have to have the majority of users voting well so we can overrule the bad upvotes. This is the nature of the system.

Third, if these users continue to contribute nothing useful to the site, as I said in the bullets, they should be warned, suspended, and deleted. Therefore, they will rapidly lose any power and privileges they might have gained. As is, the user in question has a measly 24 reputation, and has already been warned to clean up her act or go play elsewhere.

Answer 3

Trash has to be taken out, if not right away then eventually. With extremely poor answers (whether they be the specific pseudoscience ones here, or any other answer with a score of -3 or lower) the question is not if they should be deleted but when they should be deleted.

By keeping a pseudoscience answer around, you are simply keeping it accessible to search engines. That means when some crank searches for "iodine infused tin-foil hats", he gets out site as the top result (since SE has such high SEO). The user then comes to our site with no knowledge of what upvotes/downvotes mean. Even if they did know, cranks are usually used to getting downvotes from the 'man/establishment suppressing' their ideas. Have you ever seen a pseudoscience proponent go: "oh yeah, that's logical, notable scientists disagree with me, I should rethink my position or take my comments elsewhere". I have never seen this happen, when they see crap on our site (even if it is downvoted) it will just encourage them to post more crap (and then upvote old crap when they get that easy-to-get 15 rep; we have seen this upvoting already on the case of the specific questions of this topic).

Who does keeping trash around send a message to? Users that are regulars to the site (and understand how downvotes/upvotes work) already voted on the answer to deem it as crap. Once the question is off the main page, people rarely see it unless they get a link to it or search. Very few people link their friends to bad answers going "hey, check out how bad this answer is". It is much more likely that a link will be given as "hey fellow tin-hatter, look at the establishment at CogSci suppress our ways with their orthodox narrow-minded scientific ways".

Lastly, at least 3 high rep users (Ben, Myself, and Jonsca) have expressed a very strong opinion in support of having these 'answers' deleted. We are the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th highest rep users, the only user of higher rep is a moderator. We cannot yet cast delete votes, and so we have flagged the question for deletion by the moderators. As soon as we get 4k rep (to vote to delete questions), all 3 of us will vote to delete the question. Why do the moderators ignore us? Only one user (9th by rep) has expressed a strong opposition to deletion.

Answer 4

One reason not to delete such answers, is that once they are deleted, the lesson is deleted for everyone. Having such posts visible with many downvotes demonstrates what is not acceptable. It's not that experienced users need to know such things, but new users coming in are going to try and get a handle on what this community is about. Seeing highly downvoted posts about psuedoscience shows them, "we do not tolerate such things here". It's the inverse of seeing a highly upvoted post, which shows users what kind of things are desirable here.

I'm not against deleting this post, but this should at least be considered.