@Sklivvz a wrong but not deleted answer

Well, and now you've deleted it (at least heavily edited/censored).

@ChrisW it's still wrong and not deleted

of course IMO, that is

@Sklivvz You deleted most of it.

I thought that "weighing the evidence" was supposed to be the readers' job.

I've deleted a bunch of links to blogs and quotes from personal opinions. Those parts are not simply wrong.

@Articuno let's discuss it first.

The purpose of edits is to improve answers. With your rollback you've added in: links to potentially dangerous health advice; irrelevant opinions which are not evidence.

Does it make the answer better?

It had 50+ comments and it's at -14, and you want to revert to it - please justify this with a proper reason. "A mod is censoring it" is not a reason.

As a user I've improved it. As a mod I've put it into a state where it's possibly not a source of long diatribes as it was.

The version you say is "censored" is still available to the public in the revision history. However I see no reason for you to try and prevent me from doing edits. Any user can do that.

?

there's a clearly bad answer, I've tried to improve it. what's wrong with it?

"I've deleted a bunch of links to blogs and quotes from personal opinions."

no, because they are opinions

the question is not about opinions

in any case: if you have any idea on how to improve that answer, I'm all ears.

ok, whatever. It's a bad answer by all standards. I've tried to improve it. You didn't like my edit.

How is reverting the answer making it better?

Edits are part of the system

Why do you think we have edits?

Only to add stuff?

How is the point of view of the answer changed?

I've left the conclusion as it was

Most of the OP original copy.

that's not an answer

I didn't say that.

> As a user I've improved it.

IMO it's clearly not an edit that the 'original author' of the answer would approve of.

IMO edits are supposed to be cooperative.

IMO answers are supposed to be improved so they don't sink to -14 and generate 50 comments.

the OP is evidently not cooperative

It's one thing if the OP complains and reverts. I can engage them in a constructive chat

It's another thing to simply revert an edit screaming censorship by another user.

My previous experience suggests that your 'constructive chat' means 'telling them that you're right'.

A constructive chat would simply mean asking them not to point to blogs but to evidence, or to at least contextualize the fact that they are not evidence per se.

It has been asked of the OP over and over in the comments.

Maybe in chat it would go better, I don't know. at least I'm trying...

@Oddthinking can you please take a look at the following edit I made and give a second opinion? Feel free to revert if you think I'm censoring or it's a bad edit.

@Sklivvz I don't think that answer can be saved, I actually prefer to have all the conspiracy bullshit in the open. Either we remove the answer entirely, or we just leave it heavily downvoted at the bottom

@MadScientist what's the purpose of keeping it, if it's so bad?

And by bad, I also mean: "generating useless discussion"

@Sklivvz I probably would have deleted it if I had been the first moderator encountering it. But the justification is borderline, especially as there is one reference to a peer-reviewed article which formally meets our requirements.

There's also the link farm aspect of the answer that troubles me

@Sklivvz Is that a similar question as, "What's the point in allowing evidence from the prosecution and from the defence, in a legal trial?" Perhaps we're meant to let users see whatever 'evidence' there is to see, and trust readers to assess it. And it's not just readers: it's (albeit perhaps to a lesser extent) the writers, people who answer questions, who matter too. If you censor what they write because of your own indisputable opinion, they might not like that. "Not nice => failed site."

Yes it looks tidy/tidier if/after you delete all answers with a negative score.

Not all evidence is admissible in a court of law...

Well that's a fact.

Not all links are evidence...

I'm trying to allow all positions here, but we only allow reputable references.

It's not a matter of tidiness or democracy. There's nothing democratic about science or scientific skepticism. There's only evidence. The question is skeptical about a Nobel prize speaking outside of their area of expertise. Clearly proposing another Nobel prize speaking outside of their area of expertise is not providing evidence. It's repeating the claim.

My first assignment as a software development engineer, I was the junior on a two-man team. I went on a course, learned about software architecture, and invented a software design for our upcoming project, while my team leader did other things: schedule, budget, test equipment, etc. I presented my idea for the design, my (slower) team leader didn't understand it immediately, I was excited and sure my design was workable and talked about it enthusiastically/accordingly. After that meeting ...

... our manager, who'd been sitting in on our meeting and saw how we worked together, said to me, "It's not enough to be right." IOW I think my idea about the software was right, but I hadn't done a good job of working with my team-leader: getting his ideas, understanding his problems, agreeing with things he said that I could agree with (i.e. being agreeable).

@Sklivvz That's a concise criticism. If you left that, with the answer, as a comment, it would help to explain/justify why that answer is so heavily down-voted.

I can't parse your last sentence

I left the following comment:

If you left the answer without editing it, if instead of editing it you downvoted it and added a comment like "The question is skeptical about a Nobel prize speaking outside of their area of expertise. Clearly proposing another Nobel prize speaking outside of their area of expertise is not providing evidence. It's repeating the claim." then your comment would help to explain the downvote.

@ChrisW clearly, as 53 other comments prove, commenting does not work in this case. Otherwise don't you normally see me commenting?

"commenting does not work" There's more than one reason for a comment. a) To persuade the OP to change their answer b) To act as a message to future readers, to convey your opinion of what's wrong the answer.

Ideally IMO a downvote should always be accompanied by a comment.

How do you know I've downvoted it?

The comment is what helps to make it "constructive" criticism (the downvote is negative but otherwise uninformative).

That doesn't (IMO) mean that every comment should eventually be deleted, that every valid comment should be incorporated into the answer, that every answer with a negative score should be deleted.

There's a long tradition of arguing pro and con commenting with the downvotes on SE. The current "best practice" is to accept votes with no comments. In fact comments like "-1 because reason" are explicitly discouraged

It seems somewhat pointless to sit here 'arguing' with you about whether to keep borderline or bad answers so I don't want to continue this for too long. It does keep coming up though. I'm trying to understand the rules (moderation practices), and I thought I'd settled with Oddthinking that this was an example of an answer which, however bad, wasn't going to be deleted.

@ChrisW it's not deleted

the reason it is not is that it has 1 reputable reference. The rest of the answer was "piggibacking" on this to simply repeat the claim without adding any value (in fact, while attracting downvotes, imo).

80% deleted.

In your opinion, sorry

Instead of reviving my answer to the "Rules?" topic, perhaps it would be helpful to have a topic similar to "FAQ: What makes an answer good on Skeptics.SE?" which lists (as CW) all the reasons why an answer might be deleted.

Obvious reasons include "spam" and "no references".

There are more-borderline reasons like "poor references"

"indirect evidence"

"unjustified arithmetic"

It's not clear why sometimes a newspaper article is allowed as a reference ("evidence"), whereas a quote from a Nobel prize winner sometimes isn't.

@Sklivvz In fact comments like "-1 because reason" are explicitly discouraged <-- Where has that been discussed / made explicit?

Given that the bounty on skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/9751/… expires in a day and as far as I understand the rules of this website the answer is no real answer, I suggest removing the answer. Wrong answers are not supposed to get bounties.

@chrisw it's on the comment privilege page: help->privileges

@chrisw I'm preparing a specific Q&A about original research answers. The other mods are reviewing it right now.

skeptics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/comment says

Criticisms which do not add anything constructive ("-1, see previous comments you scallywag!")

So the previous comments were fine and useful.

I'll downvote without commenting, if I agree with a previous comment/criticism.

If an answer has a lot wrong with it, it might attract a lot of (justified) critical comments.

of course! it's the "I've downvoted you because you suck" attitude which is not constructive. Many "-1 xxx" tend to be like that. However, a constructive criticism (i.e. something the OP can act upon) is certainly a very good use of comments!

Agreed, but there's more: it doesn't just have to be something the OP can act on. IMO a comment can also be something which a future reader can act on, i.e. "Beware of this answer, I think it's wrong because (reason)".

@Christian the bounty will not be awarded

> If you do not award your bounty within 7 days (plus the grace period), the highest voted answer created after the bounty started with a minimum score of 2 will be awarded half the bounty amount. If two or more eligible answers have the same score (i.e., their scores are tied), the oldest answer is awarded the bounty. If there's no answer meeting those criteria, the bounty is not awarded to anyone.

the answer needs to have at least +2 score

@ChrisW Yes that's normally tolerated

However

and your suggested use does not really fall in any of those categories

@Sklivvz "If something is wrong, please leave a comment or edit the post to correct it."

^ last sentence of skeptics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/vote-down

I'll edit a post iff I suspect that the OP would like my edit.

Because when I'm acting as a user (not as a moderator) I don't want to risk starting any edit war: it's not my answer to edit!

Usually if my edit is small as well as correct, I'd expect the OP to be OK with it.

But I don't treat the whole site as one big community wiki, for me to edit however I please.

@ChrisW there are clear limitations to edit, such as "do not change meaning"

skeptics.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/edit

Your suggested use "Deleting references I don't approve of" does not really fall into any of the categories listed in "some common reasons to edit".

that's your opinion

I removed parts which were linking to disreputable sites

@Sklivvz Yes I think that goes without saying, doesn't it?

don't call it "my suggested use", then.

@Sklivvz I was quoting/parroting your phraseology above.

I would never delete something because I don't approve of it.

Oh. You deleted because it was downvoted by others.

@Sklivvz: Given that the question has 8 positive votes and 8 negative votes I'm not sure that it won't be at +2 tomorrow. In any case I don't see any reason why the question isn't deleted.

If so then one of the "FAQ: Reasons why an answer might be deleted" might include, "Because it's been heavily downvoted by the community."

As far as links to disreputable websites go, I don't see the point in editing answers to remove them. More links helps users to understand an answer and the background of the answer. If the links aren't enough to make the question perform at the standards of the website, the whole answer can be deleted.

there are two points here

1. we want to allow different opinions if supported by evidence

2. we do not want to be a platform for woo and pseudoscientific material.

The OP was simply adding more and more aids denialist material which did not support the answer. He's been doing that in another case as well. That answer has been deleted because it had no reputable reference at all.

As I commented, he can still improve his answer by adding real evidence. Is there other evidence that supports the claim? If there is, he can add it, but not treat our platform as a soapbox.

I don't think that "nobel prize winner X holds opinion Y" is irrelevant or inherently pseudoscientific. I don't think you win public debates against pseudoscience by preventing the arguments that people who believe in pseudoscience generally make from being aired. Getting some of the Google searches from searchers for pseudoscientific material is also useful.

@Sklivvz Where people might disagree is if they have different opinions about what evidence is. I went looking for a definition of "reputable" on meta, and didn't see an obvious one. This answer (of yours) says "it's relative". This answer says "I know it when I see it". One reason I'm reluctant to delete opinions/evidence I disagree with is that, then people can no longer see it / know it

... nor assess the relative merits of the sources.

In particular: "we should be offering better quality evidence than the original source."

AIDS and HIV for example. What do I know? I believed they're related, believe I've read they're related. If someone wants me to consider whether they are, really, related, it might be better for me to see both sides of the argument.

If the site does ever allow me to see both sides of an argument presented, one of those sides will often be no better than the original source (and the other sides will either be better or worse than the original source).

The answer had a bunch of links with no quote nor context. Those are not subpoints.

Also it had a few links to "expert" opinions which were not of experts

but they were presented as evidence, not as subplots

There's is a lot of difference between presenting a controversy, and explaining even one side of it only, and simply soapboxing. The difference is evident.

Okay, I reviewed the answer with we are talking about and I agree that it was problematic. Linking to Peter Duesberg's Wikipedia article instead of linking to his published papers is simply lazy.

@Sklivvz Yes; evident, at least, who everyone who shares sufficiently similar values / opinions.

@ChrisW I don't think: "Here's a link to an audio seminar that explains why I'm right" is acceptable no matter what topic we are speaking about. Posting link lists is also problematic.

OP: "Duesberg argues that retroviruses like HIV must be harmless to survive: they do not kill cells and they do not cause cancer, he maintains"

Reference (chosen by OP) " The scientific consensus is that the Duesberg hypothesis is incorrect and that HIV is the cause of AIDS."

there are a bunch of opinions at the bottom of the answer: all of them are appeals to authority. Based on what standard should we allow them?

Finally the other thing I removed is a criticism to the way Gallio worked by a random site whose home page simply restates the claim

There's a difference between taking random AIDS-denialist material and just adding it to an answer and presenting the available evidence or describing the controversy.

Well I think we agree it wasn't a good (convincing) answer.

Are you suggesting that if I answered "There are many articles about AIDS/HIV but AIDS comes from Uranus" then we should keep this junk in perpetuity in its original untouched format?

Is positing a single valid reference a leeway for adding whatever you want to the answer?

I don't see how that is sustainable in general for the site

@Sklivvz "Are you suggesting that ..." No I'm not: not literally. And I'm not sure whether to call that a reductio ad absurdum, or a strawman. More of a strawman, IMO.

@Sklivvz Are you suggesting that you get to decide what's a "valid reference"? That every reference is either valid or invalid, where valid references should be upvoted and invalid references deleted?

No, I am suggesting that references can be strong or weak, but not all links are references.

@Sklivvz I think some sites survive even with occasional, negatively-voted answers.

let's leave the irony aside, shall we

They're relatively harmless, when the topic has a positively-voted answer to compare it against.

whatstheharm.net/hivaidsdenial.html

Not harmless

I think the revisions were warranted. Any change in an answer that would be sensible in a good answer (add sources, reduce unclarity, only answer the question itself) should also be done in a bad answer. If that means no text - then bless us all with the complete lack of such bullshit (to quote Penn).

Another "wrong" question which is acceptable skeptics.stackexchange.com/a/7216/96

This has actually plenty of links to peer reviewed material. It's a perfectly valid answer... but apparently it's wrong.