What are your criteria for thumbing-down an answer?

Question

I often see perfectly good answers get thumbs down in the math forum. This floors me because contrary to other topics, math is usually not a matter of opinion. For example whenever someone asks whether zero is odd or even, or whether 0.999... = 1, the correct answers get almost as many thumbs down a the wrong answers.

I, for one, never thumb-down an answer unless I know it to be factually wrong.

(By the way, if you think the parity of zero or the fact that 0.999... = 1 are matters of opinion, you need to look up a few serious math sites.)

Oh well... consider this a rant well worth the 5 points.

Answer 1

Sometimes I thumb down wrong answers and sometimes I don't. But I don't thumb down an answer if I'm only guessing that it's wrong. I'm more likely to thumb down a wrong answer if either:

• The true answer might be unclear to the asker because
- There are a number of incorrect answers, or
- The correct answer might be in doubt because it has been thumbed down by somebody else.

• A thoughtless answer in which it appears no real effort was made to be right.

One more thing. I have observed that thumbing down answers appears to be contagious. A lot of questions have few or no thumbs down. But other questions have thumbs down all over the place. I suspect trolls do some of the thumbing down of wrong and right answers alike just to be annoying.

Answer 2

I don't usually thumb down answers. I do agree that math is factual rather than opinions!

I usually solve a question and I will disagree if the answer given is wrong.