I got this review audit and downvoted it.

Not because of its quality, but because I did not agree with the answer (I may be wrong, looking at the number of upvotes).

I do not think this should be an audit. If he would have linked the part of the standard it may be reasonable to expect me to read the section and vote based on this, but with this short answer it is an honest mistake to believe it to be wrong.

It is kind of a trap here, because it looks like a quick shot answer which is plain wrong and requires expert knowledge to know it is true.

It would make a nice quiz question with surprising answer and reading it with many upvotes I would think I learned something new which is really nice to know. But in a review audit it is hard to see it is wrong.

For a good audit for example the standard could be linked which makes obvious that it is an high quality answer, while you currently need to believe the answerer without having clues why he is right.

Of course I could have opened it out of queue to vote, but I thought I do not need to do so for honestly expressing my opinion. If I would have done it, the upvotes would have told me that I am probably wrong. That's why it was kind of mean to show it with the wrong number of votes so I thought I were right.

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    You can "fix" it yourself. Downvote the answer out of the queue, and it will no longer be an audit. – yivi Apr 11 '18 at 9:15
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    What exactly don't you agree with? That's not the answerer's opinion, that's the C++ standard. – user202729 Apr 11 '18 at 9:16
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    You meant -- you thought it was wrong so you downvoted it? Well then -- you should always verify its correctness before voting. – user202729 Apr 11 '18 at 9:17
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    Even more so in the "first posts" queue... If you are voting carelessly, you are not reviewing properly. In that sense, it was a great audit. – yivi Apr 11 '18 at 9:18
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    I don't agree with it being a audit fail for downvoting this. Audits should be clearly wrong or bad quality. I may have been wrong, but not because I did not pay attention. @yivi I do not understand what you mean, can I fix my failure be removing my downvote? It did not get recorded as far as I see. – allo Apr 11 '18 at 9:23
  • 15 users upvote it, no one downvote it, it's accepted. It must be "clearly" good. – user202729 Apr 11 '18 at 9:26
  • @user202729 it is not compulsory sometimes a question is turned to another track – Rajendran Nadar Apr 11 '18 at 9:30
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    @RaajNadar What are you replying to? | If you're saying that sometimes the OP changes their question to ask a complete different question, they should be rollback. If necessary (e.g., the OP do that multiple times), flag for moderator attention. – user202729 Apr 11 '18 at 9:35
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    I kneel down every day and say a little prayer, wishing that one of my posts won't be used for an audit. So far it has been working. – Hans Passant Apr 11 '18 at 10:06
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  • Leaving the audit part beside, I find it rather problematic if you down-vote a correct answer just because you think it is wrong without having any objective proof for this. I agree that it would be good if the answer would contain parts of the standard, but it's in no way wrong or not useful. – BDL Apr 11 '18 at 13:47
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    You seriously think that an answer being short makes it inherently incorrect? If so, that reasoning is faulty. – user4639281 Apr 11 '18 at 16:38
  • That's not what I said. – allo Apr 12 '18 at 7:27
  • May I ask why I am obviously review banned today, after the audit did not get me banned yesterday and I did not fail audits in the mean time? Did someone here get annoyed and manually ban me? – allo Apr 12 '18 at 7:30

You should be more careful on how you vote when going through the FP queue.

(Well, voting with care should be a given anywhere, but even more so in that queue).

You are reviewing posts of users who are new to the platform. Your actions there are supposed to help and guide these users into becoming productive users of the community.

If you are voting on "hunches" instead of doing your due diligence, you will be sending the wrong signals to these new users. You'll reward poor posts (encouraging bad habits), or you'll treat them unfairly and make feel unwelcome by down-voting posts that didn't deserve down-voting (as could been said in the case of the audit you failed).

Personally, I do not see anything wrong in the audit:

  • If you weren't sure, you should have skipped or researched properly before voting.

  • If you were sure and you were wrong, no biggie. We all make mistakes. Failing this particular audit will hopefully push you to be even more careful in the future, which is the whole point of audits.

  • If you were sure of your down-vote and continue to believe the answer is wrong (or poor, or just generally not useful), just down-vote the post outside of the queue. It will no longer be an audit, so you'd be fixing this issue for future reviewers (more below).

And in any case, reading this carefully will help you in continue reviewing successfully.

In the general case: if you disagree that a post should be an audit (and you think that it truly deserves a down-vote) down-voting it outside of the review queue will make it so it's no longer eligible to be an audit in the future.

(This is not valid for all types of audits, obviously; but I think it's true for any audit that's based on a non-deleted post).

  • I admit the mistake. I just say I honestly made this mistake and I did not make it because I do not care about the queue or did not pay attention. – allo Apr 11 '18 at 9:24
  • I do not want downvote out of queue when I see now its an good answer. I still believe it is no good review audit and guess few users know that int is an object. Can I otherwise flag it to be removed as audit? – allo Apr 11 '18 at 9:34
  • @allo You can raise it here in meta, but so far your arguments are failing to get traction. Maybe later someone will agree with you, either a mod or a regular user. – yivi Apr 11 '18 at 9:35
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    @allo If they don't know about that they should [Skip]. – user202729 Apr 11 '18 at 9:36
  • I did so. So far I never had success here even when it is the recommended way to report bad audits. It's a bit disappointing to even try to report them. – allo Apr 11 '18 at 9:36
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    @user202729 I thought I know about it. I was wrong. Sometimes this happens. I never claimed to be perfect or that I voted correctly, I only say the audit is kind of a trap. It depends on expert knowledge, which is not cited in the answer (possibly making it not a very good answer) and looks like someone answered without much knowlege. The answer would make a nice quiz question, but no good audit. – allo Apr 11 '18 at 9:37
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    @allo Because they are not bad audits. As pointed out by this answer. – user202729 Apr 11 '18 at 9:37
  • @allo After some more thoughts.... leaving a comment saying [Can you cite the relevant part of the standard?] can also be appropriate, but also fails the audit. (?) – user202729 Apr 12 '18 at 4:14
  • I think commenting does not faIl the audit anymore. But I must admit, without citation I did not miss the citation but thought of the post to be plain wrong. With citation I would have checked the citation and would have learned something new ;). – allo Apr 12 '18 at 7:27

If you aren't sufficiently knowledgeable about the subject matter that the post is about, that's fine, you don't need to be an expert in every single subject in order to use the review queue. What is important is that you not vote on a post based on its technical accuracy *when you don't actually know it's technical accuracy.

Now there will be some posts that you will be able to clearly see aren't useful even without technical expertise because they're just that bad, either because they're so unclear, or missing so much information, or aren't an attempt to answer, etc. that you don't even need to be an expert in the field to know that the answer isn't useful, but for answers that aren't exceptionally bad, you should be using the first posts queue to be performing actions other than voting, unless you happen to be knowledgeable about the subject matter of the post.

Lots of posts can be improved via editing to be either better in general, or more in line with how SO expects answers to be structured, even if you aren't familiar with the subject matter. You can often improve the formatting, remove noise, improve spelling/grammar, etc. You can often also provide guidance, via comments, on things that the author is doing well or poorly, perhaps asking leading questions as to additional information that you think would be helpful, or things that you think could be clearer.

You don't need to skip every post that you aren't an expert in, you just shouldn't be voting on most of such answers.

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