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This question has an accepted answer with zero upvotes, two downvotes. Poster want to delete it, but he can't because it was the accepted answer. Why shouldn't those be deletable?

Elsewhere Kortuk comments

As a non-expert with no rep it does not make sense to give an upvote when they have yet to receive validation from the community.

Shouldn't this go for accepting answers as well? If the community thinks it's a bad answer isn't it just possible that OP made a mistake in accepting it. And shouldn't the answerer have the right to delete it?

update
OP has accepted another answer now.

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  • \$\begingroup\$ The answer has now been deleted following a request by its author. \$\endgroup\$
    – Kevin Vermeer
    May 9, 2012 at 13:43
  • \$\begingroup\$ @stevenvh, the fact that it was a very low quality question and has now been closed correlates heavily with issues involving answers receiving upvotes/accepts that they don't deserve. \$\endgroup\$
    – Kortuk
    May 9, 2012 at 23:38

1 Answer 1

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Once an answer is accepted, it has been flagged as valuable to the community. Although the poster wrote the answer, once the community finds it valuable, it is no longer the right of the poster to delete it, any more than it is the right of someone such as the OP of this question to ask to have all of their content removed. The way to resolve this is to write a better answer and ask that the situation is correct. If a post of negative value is written and accepted and the error is found later by the poster, and the asker of the question cannot be approached, we have reached a situation where an exception handler can take over (flag a moderator).

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  • \$\begingroup\$ @endolith, how to know you are tired, making the mistakes that were edited out. Thank you. \$\endgroup\$
    – Kortuk
    May 9, 2012 at 14:14
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    \$\begingroup\$ Technically the community didn't find the accepted answer valuable, only the OP. The amount the community values a answer is indicated by votes. \$\endgroup\$
    – Olin Lathrop
    May 9, 2012 at 15:35
  • \$\begingroup\$ @OlinLathrop, the person whom wrote the question found it useful and that it solved their issue. If it resolved an issue at least one person in the community found it useful and it is assumed that more people in the community will also. It does get priority on upvotes(or downvotes as occasionally happens) from the rest of the community at this point(first in the list). \$\endgroup\$
    – Kortuk
    May 9, 2012 at 23:35
  • \$\begingroup\$ @OlinLathrop, As I look at this again I think it is more fair to say this is one of the ways the stack exchange tries to note when an answer has become useful to the community. It does not necessarily mean it is useful, just that it is enough to require the exception handler to hel pout. \$\endgroup\$
    – Kortuk
    May 14, 2012 at 10:39

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