How to interpret voting status when a CM is involved?

Question

In the meta question Can we let adequate explanation be an alternative to “Backing it up”?, Shogs answer explaining why we can't allow explanations as backups is now being outvoted by artofcodes answer, which states the opposite.

I am now a bit confused and quite unsure how to proceed. I have stopped with the reviewing since friday because I am unsure where we currently stand on the back-it-up issue.

I do not want to create just another discussion here about which solution is better. I am looking for facts about the decisions made, about policies currently in place.

I think the reason why I am so confused is that shog is a Community Manager and I believe that he has thought this through. I am unsure how much power and influence he has or should have on the voting in IPS Meta. I do not know how I should interpret the current voting status.

Further Uncertainty comes from the fact that in the beginning, shogs answer was highest voted for a long time.

Answer 1

How you decide to proceed in regards to a feature-request meta where the top voted answer contradicts the answer of a diamond mod is still the same as how you decide with any other feature-request meta.

It is a judgement call

As explained quite nicely by shog, you need to determine the outcome of each post individually. The content of the answers and the discussion and response to those varying answers should all be considered when deciding what to do.

Votes are usually a good indication of what the communities attitude towards a specific answer is and an answer coming from a diamond mod is usually a good indication that they have an understanding of how the site works that they are basing their answer off. However, mods are not "all knowing" and as outlined with some of the other answers here there are other factors that can influence votes.

All you can do is read up and try to make as informed a decision as possible, at least until a clear consensus has been found. (But even then it is still subject to analysis)

Answer 2

Probably worth noting first that my answer was a response to Art's answer (I do say that right at the top), which was the top answer when I started writing it. IOW, my answer exists because Art's suggestion is the top answer. That it briefly out-ranked the answer it responded to is probably an anomaly.

Beyond that... It's just, like, my opinion, man. I don't think a site where the rule for what's allowed boils down to "is it popular?" is a particularly great resource... But, YMMV. I can't ignore the fact that a good bit of what makes up acceptable social behavior is what is popularly accepted - in other words, that matching the feelings of most voters here might be as good an indicator of "truth" as anything else when it comes to interpersonal advice (as long as the asker's culture happens to match that of the voters here).

This entire discussion arose from concern that folks are answering questions rooted in cultures they know nothing about. "Back it up" is one approach to solving that, but hardly the easiest. At the end of the day, which solution is chosen - or whether this is solved at all - is decided by the folks who use the site daily, not drive-by CMs.

Answer 3

Something worth remembering as we move forward; this is still a Stack Exchange site. If we want the site to graduate or even remain open we probably need to raise standards somewhere.

I suspect that a lot of what we've been seeing in the voting on meta surrounding the back-it-up policy is simply blow back. When comments are left on unsupported answers directing them to meta, some of those users actually show up on meta and vote. Given that their answer was just downvoted, and that most folks don't like being downvoted, they're probably going to be inclined to vote for the perspective that allows them to continue to write unsupported answers without being downvoted.

This obviously isn't ideal...

In the specific case of artofcode's answer; most users are going to be inclined to think that their answers are perfectly well explained and that their ideas are widely shared. So, someone coming to meta after being freshly downvoted and commented is very likely to say "yes, this! This is obviously the way things should be done."

If we want IPS to survive as a site, we need to raise the bar. Back-it-up isn't a high standard, it's really not hard to support an answer. And I suspect that if we continue down the path of having 10 or more low quality answers per question, SE may eventually decide that what we're doing here doesn't jive with the standards of the rest of the network...