I'm sure most (if not all) users of the last week or so has seen this question: Clothing store access in Pokémon X & Y. If not, here's the history:
- There was an initial issue with the amount of spoiler markup the OP had used. The question was edited, but the comments remain (I'll come back to this)
- After quickly gaining a lot of views, the question started gathering a lot of 'this worked for me', 'no that's wrong, this is what works' style answers, most from 'one time' or anonymous users. No authoritative answer, just heresay and speculation. A lot of these answers are duplicates, or repeat information (again, I'll come back to this)
- Oak protects the question to stem the tide
- iber answers with an authoritative answer, complete with source, which is promptly upvoted & marked as accepted
Now, I flag the question, with the comment:
It (finally) has a decent, authoritative answer. can we clean up the dupe answers and the comments on the question (about spoiler markup etc)?
Which gets declined with the reasoning:
flag individually for each one you think should be removed
So I flag one of the answers. There's no 'duplicate' flag reason for answers, so I again flag for mod attention and say:
Duplicate of Roxy Lalonde's answer
which, again, gets declined with
flags should only be used to make moderators aware of content that requires their intervention
Ok no problem, so what do I do now?. The comments about spoiler/spoiler markup weren't purged, None of the dupe speculation answers have been removed (that I can see, a 10k user may state otherwise), and I've got two conflicting decline messages (I'm guessing from separate mods).
To summarise, this isn't the first question that has attracted duplicate, speculative answers and it certainly won't be the last. So my questions are:
- In general, how should I be treating duplicate answers?
- In this case, Should I instead be flagging these answers as 'low-quality', as they are mainly speculative?
- What classifies as "content that requires [mod] intervention?