Why was my answer deleted?

Question

Below is the standard SE Help Center text for why answers may be deleted:

Answers that do not fundamentally answer the question may be removed. This includes answers that are:

• commentary on the question or other answers
• asking another, different question
• “thanks!” or “me too!” responses
• exact duplicates of other answers
• barely more than a link to an external site
• not even a partial answer to the actual question

Sadly, our Help Center entry on this subject is not one of the editable ones. This is an issue, because (based on flags and user deletion votes), we are also deleting answers for having insufficient sourcing.

I asked the collective minds in the teacher's lounge, and was told that's OK, as long as its a well-established site policy. So we need to establish what site policy is in this matter.

Answer 1

The following describes our site policy, in practice:

In addition to what is listed on the Help Center for answer deletion reasons (see above), there is one additional bullet:

- contains inadequte references for its non-trivial assertions.

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Personal site mod addendum

As a moderator, I will step in and delete answers personally under the following conditions:

• The answer is patently offensive or garbage^*.
• The answer is a reposting of a deleted answer.
• The answer is flagged for moderator attention as not being a real answer and it fits one of the criteria listed above as "not a real answer" and one of the following is true
  • It has been utterly rejected by the users, as evidenced by a very negative score (generally -4 or less)
  • It has been badly received (a moderately negative score) and has user deletion votes.
  • It is indisputably a comment rather than an answer, but I can save it by moving it to a comment. (I won't do this for users who don't have privs to make a comment).

Technically I believe it would be kosher to get rid of the last 3 bullets and just delete all such posts, but I'm trying to not delete content that users find valuable in spite of technically violating the rules.

^{* - A "garbage" post is a post that is making no good-faith effort whatsoever to participate in the topic of the question or even this website. This often includes (but is not limited to) spam, gibberish, unrelated incoherent screeds / drunken ramblings, personal statements, and promotion of completely unrelated religious or conspiracy-based belief systems.}

Answer 2

I'd like to bring up a specific post, give my own opinion, and ask what others think.

This is a post by @TylerDurden in response to the question: Does Chinese history really span the past 5000 years?

I down voted this question because it is complete nonsense for anyone who has read Chinese History. It also has no sources at all; a non-trivial assertion like "China didn't have writing until the Tang Dynasty" should certainly have a source that refutes the commonly portrayed history of Chinese writing.

Nonetheless, I don't think it should be deleted; it contains valuable information in that we have downvoted it, and provided refutation in the comments. If we delete it, we loose both. And the reputation of SE should remain high enough that our votes will matter to those who care, and those who like crackpot theories won't pay attention either way. Someone who might be enticed by the crazy theories, but sees that it is down voted, might decide to view the other answers as well.