<h3>Flagging and voting</h3>
<p>The comments after the question ultimately focus on what does &quot;not an answer&quot; mean and what is the purpose of flags.  Perhaps this can be clarified by pointing out that <em>moderators do not adjudicate the correctness of answers.</em>  We would like to have that breadth of knowledge, but I'm sure I don't and I suspect the other mods aren't omniscient, either.</p>
<p>So what the site is asking you, the <em>community</em>, to do, is to signal correctness, appropriateness, usefulness, suitability, and all those good things, by <em>voting.</em>  <strong>If you understand a reply (or a question), whether it's good or bad, then please vote on it!</strong>   Don't leave any of our pages without at least considering placing a vote on the question and at least one reply (if not all of them).  As a statistically minded person, you know that a small number of votes is a highly uncertain indicator, whereas a large number--although imperfect, to be sure--tends on the whole to be more reliable.  <strong>Your vote counts.</strong>  It is the means by which reputation is created, more power is given to the community to act, and the quality of the site is maintained.</p>
<p><strong>Moderators</strong> are here to help when there is a <em>functional problem</em> with some element of the site.  These are usually posts that either contain no information (&quot;thanks, I liked that&quot;), are misplaced (such as questions posted as replied), obnoxious (spam, flames, etc.), or simply incomprehensible (such as problems with the language, corrupted text, possible site bugs, etc.).  <strong>When you find such a problem, please flag it.</strong></p>
<p>Yes, sometimes it's hard to distinguish a functional problem from a bad question or reply: if a reply is incomprehensible, should it be downvoted or deleted? (My tendency is to delete it whenever it becomes apparent that a large number of downvotes will be accumulated, out of compassion for the responsible party and their reputation.  I could easily be persuaded to adjust that policy: this is one of those gray areas.)</p>
<p>I would suggest that <strong>if you think a reply is wrong or misdirected</strong>, then do some combination of (1) providing a constructive comment, (2) downvoting, (3) providing a counter-reply, (4) inviting the poster to discuss the issue with you in a chat room, and (5) leaving a comment encouraging other users to vote appropriately (in that order, as needed).  When this is done in a civil manner, moderators do not need to be involved and in fact won't be of any special help (except perhaps to help create a chat room or perform other supporting functions like that).</p>
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<h3>Consistency of moderation</h3>
<p>The <em>modus operandi</em> of moderators are not completely uniform: we work in slightly different ways.  For example, some of us prefer to edit posts more than others; some of us post more comments (to encourage people to do their own editing, closing, deleting, etc.).  We have different levels of experience with other sites in the SE universe, which can affect our tendencies to migrate questions.  However, in the course of our work we naturally see much of what each other does and we check for inconsistencies.  We confer about problematic situations with each other (in a dedicated chat room) or with more than 200 mods across all the SE sites (in another dedicated chat room).  We bring these conversations public here on meta (or occasionally in comments) whenever we think the community might appreciate getting involved.</p>
<p>This constant contact helps assure a consistency in moderation <em>at any given time,</em> but it also leads to our evolution <em>as a group</em> as we learn from previous situations, mods on other sites, and the SE team.  Therefore you will indeed find inconsistencies between actions taken a while ago and today--but I hope that today's actions tend to be better and more consonant with SE policies overall than yesterday's were.</p>
