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Comments on Is it correct to downvote answers to bad questions?
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Is it correct to downvote answers to bad questions?
Sometimes I see bad questions (e.g Off-Topic questions) but I see perfect high quality answers to it but since the question is Off-Topic, so I think that who answered the question is being a victim of this behavior (The behavior of Off-Topic questions), so my question is: Is it correct to downvote answers to bad questions or answers are downvoted (Or upvoted) as their own quality not questions quality.
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The following users marked this post as Works for me:
| User | Comment | Date |
|---|---|---|
| Kevin M. Mansour | (no comment) | Oct 4, 2021 at 17:03 |
I think there are two aspects here:
What to do about offtopic questions?
Being offtopic should trigger a close/flagging action. I see voting mostly related to the post quality (useful, shows some research effort) which is relatively independent of being on-topic/offtopic.
What to do about good answers to offtopic questions?
The most constructive thing to do in such cases is to try to propose/edit the question so it becomes "minimally" on-topic. Asking good questions is hard and it often happens for the asker to lack enough context to write an ontopic post.
If editing is not an option, I would refrain from downvoting good-quality posts. It contradicts the idea of voting up good content and voting down the bad one which is a very important principle of the entire Q&A system.
When in doubt, one can always create a meta post to discuss a question being on-topic or not and what to do about it.
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