As an editor, do I have room to improve a question even if it changes it a little?

Question

Last night I came across this question in the First Posts Review Queue:

What do I need to do when getting "not enough storage spaces" message?

Being a Fallout Shelter player myself and having experienced the same frustration as the OP, I quickly edited the original post to state more clearly what the actual question was and went on to answer it. The edit later went through peer review and was accepted.

Later I found out, to my surprise, that another user, with rights to edit posts without peer review, rolled back my changes and, with help of others, closed the question as unclear.

Well, the original question was already pretty clear to me. My edit made it stand on its own. Still, it gets rolled back and closed?

So, my question for Meta.Arqade is: as an editor, do I have the flexibility to edit a question like this one, to make it stand on its own, so it's more useful to others, even if I have to read between the lines to get the actual meaning of the OP?

I still think that the meaning was originally clear, but being a new editor, I wanted to check with you what the proper course of action is.

Answer 1

I've seen this come up quite a bit recently and it bothers me when very solid guesses about what the question is really asking get rejected simply because we can't be 100% sure that it's what the asker meant.

Yes, it's true, we shouldn't drastically alter a question to be another question entirely. But this, and many other cases I've seen, don't do that. They use their knowledge of the game and context of the question to make an edit that's highly likely to be exactly what the asker wanted. This is good. This is what we want.

If the original user doesn't like the edit, they can always roll it back themselves. If, after the edit, it attracts some answers that are now going to be invalid after the original user rolls it back, they can always just ask a new question which attempts to be clearer than the first time they asked.

By flatly ignoring the likelihood that the edit is correct, and simply saying "But we can't know for sure, so we should just close this and make the OP fix it" we're doing the following:

• Assuming the editor didn't have a good reason to believe their edit was correct.
• Creating a poor experience for the OP, who in the case of most of these questions is a new user. This often drives them to leave.
• Denying the site of useful content.

The downsides are:

• In the cases where the editor's good guess was wrong, we might confuse the OP. But they will probably still see the intentions of the edit were good. That's not a feeling they typically get when their question is closed.
• Not a thing I particularly believe in, but I've heard people complain that this "coddles" new users and won't "teach them to use the site correctly". Frankly, I think that line of reasoning is hogwash.

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We're supposed to be experts

We're all supposed to be game experts here, so really, edits like these come down to two things, to me.

1. Don't make them if you don't have a very good reason to believe that your framing of the question is the correct one.
2. Don't roll them back unless you have a very good reason to believe the editor was wrong.

Editing "just because" or rolling back "just because" is a bad idea. Leverage your gaming knowledge when making or rolling back these edits. That's what we're here for... to share our knowledge, not enforce arbitrary rules.