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I was lurking around Skeptics.SE recently, as I usually do, and I found a question that triggered some thinking on my side.

Let me put out a (not-so-much) hypothetical question.

Let's suppose we have a valid question for the site. The question gets answered, and later on one of the answers gets accepted.

However, the accepted answer is biased or simply wrong and there are other, more up-voted answers available.

What should we do in those cases?

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  • Do you have a specific example?
    – Jamiec Mod
    Nov 10 '16 at 10:46
  • @Jamiec I prefer to keep the examples for myself for a moment. I'm more interested in the community consensus about this, so I don't want to point any fingers.
    – T. Sar
    Nov 10 '16 at 11:30
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This has been covered extensively in the past, and I don't think, in this case, we're any different from other network sites.

As is stated in this question your options as a user (and assuming you have enough rep) is to

  • Downvote it
  • Comment on it and on the question, hope people read your comments.
  • Edit away and fix stuff
  • Flag it

Other related reading

And that last link is where we do start to differ. Its acceptable on StackOverflow that the accepted answer is "the one which was most helpful to the asker" but we're a little less subjective here on Skeptics, and we really are looking for the best answer which is not necessarily the most useful. I refer back to the original part of this answer - use your powers to improve an answer, or flag irregularities.

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  • Well... the problem I have with leaving an incorrect answer marked as "correct" is that for any casual reader the one with the green mark is the right one. That means any answer with a ridiculous, incorrect content can be the "right one" and be used to "win" an argument. As an example, imagine what would happen if someone accepted an answer based on one of the Wakefield studies.
    – T. Sar
    Nov 10 '16 at 18:05
  • @ThalesPereira and thats why I asked for a specific example. If there is something as plainly wrong as you suggest, then some action could be taken. Without a specific example, this is the only generic answer I can give.
    – Jamiec Mod
    Nov 11 '16 at 8:44

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