Guidance for how and when to flag a question: declined flags

Question

When reviewing first posts in particular, it is my understanding that one should check if the question is a fit for the site, among which if the question makes sufficient sense. I take these tasks fairly seriously, and have recently been confused. What constitutes "low quality"?

To make this concrete, the 2 cases that prompt me to look for guidance. I flagged these 2 for low quality, and add the feedback received after my flag was declined:

vector operations between a two-dimensional and a three-dimensional vectors ("flags should only be used if a question demands moderator attention" - I would understand if a moderator thinks it is "not low quality" (although, how, I do not know, but one can disagree); but how am I supposed to understand this?)

https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/318792/a-characterization-of-probability-theory ("moderator found no evidence to support your flag" - question was closed shortly thereafter, probably as it is not an actionable question, which is why I flagged).

As said, I take my flags very seriously, and don't want to be on the record as someone who flags many unjustified posts. Reviewing first posts has an answer box "low quality", which is a subjective criterion which I took as "it's low quality, alright, flag, then let a moderator decide what to do" - but to at least bring it to a moderator's attention I had thought to be encouraged.

I happened to visit the StackOverflow voting page today, in which candidates underline their number of flags as evidence for how much they care. To understand this properly, I do not consider flagging as preparing a future candidacy (because that will never happen); but it seems at SO flagging is considered a good thing, whereas I cannot help feeling that the most recent feedback sounded as if I was told to not bother the moderators.

It seems to tell me that only absurdly bad posts should be flagged (or spam maybe). I feel disinclined to ever flag 'low quality' again, and lean towards just waving through new posts if it just leads to me having a bad flagging record.

Answer 1

I'm answering this from a network-wide perspective (I'm a moderator on Skeptics and Biology), the attitude towards moderators using their supervotes is markedly different than on most other SE sites. This might affect also the attitude towards which posts should be flagged.

In general, I find the most useful way to think about flagging is to think about what you want to happen to the post you flagged. Usually, you flag for a moderator because you want something to happen to the post that you can't do yourself. If you don't have the power to close questions, you can flag them. If you can't delete posts (or even if you can, because on most sites deletion by the community is very hard to achieve), you can flag.

Flags are not only handled by moderators, flags that request that a question is closed can be seen and handled by the community (10k+ users). If a moderator thinks that the question is at least problematic, but doesn't want to unilaterally decide to close, they can just leave the flag in the queue and let the community handle it.

Another category of flags are custom flags that inform the moderators about problematic user behaviour, because dealing with such issues is something that regular users can't do, as they don't have the necessary tools to do this.

The "very low quality" is by far the most problematic of all flag reasons. It shouldn't be used for somewhat problematic posts, it is meant for really bad and unsalvageable posts. If you think the post is so bad that a moderator should just outright delete it, then a "very low quality" flag would be appropriate.

I personally find that "very low quality" flags are unnecessary in most cases, and you usually should use other, more descriptive flags. For questions, I would flag with one of the close reasons, a very low quality question fits into "not a real question" most of the time. For answers, very often such a low quality answer is not an answer at all, and should be flagged as "not an answer".

Answer 2

I looked at the post about vector operations and could not understand the reason for flagging it. It is a reasonable and natural question, much better than verbatim copies of homework washing up to the shores of Math.SE every day. I wish more of my calculus students asked questions like this (not necessarily at Math.SE, they can ask me).

Because "low quality" is a somewhat diffuse notion, it may help to consider a practical aspect before flagging: what would you do if you were the moderator seeing this flag?

• Would you close or delete the post at once? (Moderators cannot simply vote to close, their decisions go into effect immediately).
• Would you suspend the user who asked the question, or destroy their account?
• Would you migrate the question to another site?

If none of the above actions are called for, perhaps the post indeed does not need moderator's attention. This does not mean it's perfect, but whatever needs to be fixed can be fixed by ordinary users such as yourself. You can edit the post, comment to prompt a clarification from the user, vote to close (not yet, but soon you'll be able to), or simply vote. The first post review queue displays the voting arrows specifically to encourage the reviewers to vote on the newcomers' posts.