Gilles raised an interesting point at the very beginning of the “What are we trying to build” thread about the problem of well-written but wrong content being upvoted above badly written correct content and how this is a limitation of the voting system. This is indeed a problem that SE doesn’t deal with well.
I propose that, assuming we do keep the basic ideas of i) up/downvoting, ii) a review queue system and iii) topic badges, we then institute a separate queue for this sort of thing. Something like this:
- I see a correct answer that’s lost in the noise OR a wrong answer that has risen to the top despite being wrong.
- If I have a “gold tag badge” or some codidact equivalent (we could set a tag-score threshold, for instance), that lets me cast a special vote or flag that will put this post into a dedicated review queue for this sort of thing.
- These queues will be organized by tags, so only tag experts can review posts in them.
- In this queue, these experts will be encouraged to edit the badly written but correct post so it improves.
- Alternatively, they can cast delete votes for the upvoted bad content.
- Perhaps the queue could result in specific markers being shown next to the post: “This answer has been marked as wrong/correct by our expert reviewers”
I’m thinking we should have some way for the most expert users in any particular sub-topic to be able to mark an answer as correct or wrong in a more official capacity. I have described one way, but I’m sure there are others. What seems clear to me, is that we will need to solve the issue of bad content with many upvotes and good content with too few, but it should be done in such a way as to not affect the real voting of the community. So this idea of “expert panels” sidesteps that.