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Should non-useful best-effort answers be downvoted?
I've no criticisms for software.codidact.com/posts/294526/294527, except that it doesn't answer the question. Unfortunately, that sole caveat is significant. Otherwise, it attempts to be useful, is comprehensible, and otherwise adheres to all rules. I feel rather bad about downvoting it, so I'd like to confirm that votes are solely for usefulness.
1 answer
Help article
There is a help article providing guidance on voting.
General case
From "When should I vote?" in that help article:
Vote down content that is unclear or demonstrably wrong.
This means an answer does not need to be intentionally wrong to be downvoted.
The same section also says:
Downvotes are not rude. You might feel bad when downvoting something. You might think it is not nice. But downvotes, like upvotes, are important tools to express the community's feedback on a post. Don't downvote without a reason, but if you have a reason, vote.
Voting (up or down) helps arrange the answers with the most useful nearer the top. Downvoting a well intended but incorrect answer helps towards that.
The specific example answer
The answer opens with:
I don't really understand what you're asking
It then goes on to make a best effort attempt to provide a solution, based on guessing what the question means. If this guess had turned out to be correct, the answer may have gathered upvotes. As it turned out to be incorrect, it may gather downvotes. It was a gamble.
Ideally the "I don't really understand" would have been a comment instead of an answer, allowing clarification of the question before answering.
I don't personally see a problem with either upvoting or downvoting such a gambling answer (depending on whether it turns out to be correct or not). There is always the possibility of misinterpretation with any question. In this case, the answerer explicitly noted the potential for confusion, but every answerer makes assumptions whether we are aware of them or not. In that sense, every answer is a gambling answer, and voters decide whether to regard each one as useful or not.
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