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@Scott As a former mod, what would always trouble me are flag reasons that require me to make a technical judgement. If the rationale is clear (e.g. question clearly specifies macOS, but answer is about Windows) and expressed as such in the flag reason (and not just “not an answer”), I'd say it's fine to flag. But that's my personal interpretation; not sure how the mod team handles it these days. I've been a little out of touch with the SE mod team for a few years.
@Scott Eh, that was over six years ago! I rephrased that one sentence – you were right in that it was illogical. About downvotes, I think I was talking about flagging posts and downvoting them which I perhaps thought wasn't necessary. Of course, one should always downvote bad content (to push it down, to make it fade out, to enable high-rep users to click delete, etc.)
Meh, it's really hard to ignore poor English sometimes—especially when it leads to posts that are impossible to answer—but then again we have to accept that we can't teach people another language here. I sometimes suggest people to use Google Translate instead of attempting to formulate the question themselves.
Of course, your editing style matters a lot. Don't go impose your idiosyncrasies on other folks or delete and re-write the content; try to find a middle ground where possible and stick to the original intent. If that is not possible, do write your own answer.
"The de facto policy is, generally speaking, don't edit others' answers (like, at all)" -- absolutely disagree. Do edit others' answers if you think you're improving them. We should never discourage people from stepping in and fixing issues when they find them. I've been a prolific editor over the past years (perhaps not as much in recent times) and I've never encountered big problems there. Sure, once in a while someone objects. That's their prerogative, but it's not like the majority of folks whose answers you edit will complain. I think that this number is actually quite low.
@Thomas That would be a somewhat special case that doesn't occur often. Mods should not judge the technical nature of an answer. It could be blatantly wrong or cause problems, but that doesn't mean it should be deleted. If there are severe issues, adding a comment or -- but this could be considered too strong intervention -- editing the post to include a caveat would be the preferable option.
None of your suggested solutions works for the OP, as they have insufficient reputation. Also, a completely wrong answer shouldn't be edited by someone else to make it right, as that would definitely change the meaning of the post. Better to downvote and leave a comment, or provide another, correct answer.
