What to do about highly rated and accepted answers that are wrong?

Question

This question:
New alert keeps showing up: Server returned error NXDOMAIN, mitigating potential DNS violation DVE-2018-0001 - Ask Ubuntu
reports an annoying syslog message.

The selected answer (currently with 56 upvotes) gives a solution for for these annoying syslog entries:

cd /etc && \
mv resolv.conf resolv.conf.orig && \
ln -s /run/systemd/resolve/resolv.conf resolv.conf

The highest rated comment (24 votes) and the second highest rated answer (52 votes) say that this is only a workaround and it is wrong as it skips some processing and only hides the real problem. No other solution is offered though.

Many other answers (far fewer votes) give various other ways of "solving" the problem.

In the first 8 hours today (when the system wasn't even in use) my /var/log/syslog accumulated 124 of those annoying (displayed in red in view) messages.

I'd like to eliminate them, but there doesn't seem to be any consensus on the correct way of doing that.

(So, like many others, I've closed my eyes and made the link, knowing that it is wrong.)

I'd expect that there would be a practical correction for this problem. But all we have is a choice between:

• a way to hide the message by breaking something else (use a penny as a fuse).
• a dismissal that "this can be tolerated" (don't use your hair dryer).

After several years of this, surely the community should be able to come up with something better than that.

Even if we don't care about this specific problem itself, shouldn't we care that the highly voted and accepted answer is wrong, and that the second best answer offers no real solution?

Answer 1

Essentially, we do nothing.

The issue isn't the community, it's the infrastructure system we have in place and the reputation/voting/scoring system.

Firstly, we can't unaccept answers. Only the original post owner can who made the question. Because a lot of old questions have posters who have moved on and are no longer active, there's nothing we can do about that.

Secondly, we don't delete answers just because they're wrong now - if they were initially accurate but are no longer, then just post a comment indicating it's wrong and point at another answer (or write your own if none of the answers are correct). Historically speaking, we have tons of people with old posts that at the time the answer was right but it's no longer accurate - depriving people of that reputation (points) they've gained is not desirable so we don't just delete old posts with lots of upvotes.

You can always post a bounty on the question and reward the most desirable answer - that's always a thing if you want.

But essentially, we do nothing in these cases. Do we care? Yes, but we usually comment where possible, and if it's entirely wrong or dangerous we (moderators or high rep editors) usually edit in a notice about it, but leave the rest of the post alone.