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I know this isn't immediately an extremely specific question, but here is the rest of the explanation. I saw somebody edited my question, and they really screwed it up. I spent over an hour composing the question, and read it countless times so it would be clear, concise, and understandable. But the 'edits' that I saw they made, or tried to make, were absolutely horrendous and made the question convoluted and confusing. In fact I am not even sure the person understood the basic tenants of English grammar, that's how bad it was. But I didn't see the 'edited version' when I looked at my question, only when I looked at the 'edits' they did.

  1. When somebody 'edits' my page, whom does the 'edited version' show up to?
  2. Is there any possible way to prevent somebody from editing my question? Because English is obviously a rather unique language in the sense that multiple meanings can come from very similar words and phrases. Therefore I choose my words very carefully and I mean exactly what I want them to. The person that 'edited' one question in particular had no apparent idea what I was asking, and ended up making the 'edited version' difficult to read, and only complicated the issue due to making the question difficult to read, and therefore difficult to understand.
  3. Why in the world would this forum allow people to edit questions in which they clearly don't understand. Both not understanding the nature of the question, and in at least one of my cases, not even understanding the basic tenants of English grammar.

Thank you to anybody who read my above proclamations, I've been wondering about this sort of thing for quite awhile. But until it really affected me I didn't care enough to ask.

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    Others can edit because Arqade is a collaboratively run site. We edit to make things clearer and more precise. That's at the heart of how Arqade works, so, no, you can't prevent that from happening. – Frank Apr 12 '17 at 11:58
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    Just to clarify, are you talking about this question: gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/306543/… – Invader Skoodge Apr 12 '17 at 12:01
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    Your best bet is to take our tour, to learn what we're all about. That will give you the information needed. – Frank Apr 12 '17 at 12:02
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    If you don't want people to edit your questions, then you have to earn more reputation on the site to be able to edit back or refuse edits. You help others, gain reputation for that and respect at the same time ;) And for myself as I'm French, so not speaking English well, I'm glad people take the time to correct my questions (as I hate it when I see bad French grammar and all) – Ise Apr 12 '17 at 12:55
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    @Ise I don't think a user needs any rep to reject/accept edits on their own posts and they definitely can edit their own posts at any time. The OP's accept/reject vote on a suggested edit will always take immediate effect, too, and outweigh other votes. – Vemonus Apr 12 '17 at 20:06
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Looking at your only question that was edited, the revision history details that people only removed superfluous text and/or adjusted grammar and fixed typos. Superfluous text can be bad for a post, since it doesn't help detail your question or answer. From your question, this was considered superfluous:

let me go ahead and thank you for reading/helping me, I can't get anybody to respond on ANY official BF3 forum. So this is the only other thing I could think of to help me. I really like the answers and score system here, and so many people are genuinely helpful, anyway. I'm not the newest player to BF3 so I'm not completely ignorant of what can damage tanks. But this is something I cannot figure out...

This chunk of text does not help your question in any way. It's basically noise, which tends to make people pass up reading a post since it's too much of a nuisance. Again, at the end of your question was some more superfluous text that was removed.

Editing is something that the entire community is open to do (even unregistered users can submit edits for consideration). Our help page details it out:

All contributions are licensed under Creative Commons, and this site is collaboratively edited, like Wikipedia. If you see something that needs improvement, click edit!

Editing is important for keeping questions and answers clear, relevant, and up-to-date. If you are not comfortable with the idea of your contributions being collaboratively edited by other trusted users, this may not be the site for you.

We also have a system in place for edits made by "less seasoned" users of the site. Unless a user has more than 2,000 reputation, their edit goes into a Review Queue. The Review Queue (for Edits) is only available to those with 2,000+ reputation on this SE site. Edits made by unregistered users or users with less than 2,000 reputation are reviewed by others to make sure the edit makes sense and doesn't vandalize, make the post unclear, or conflict with the authors intent.

So, to answer your three questions:

  1. If a user with 2,000+ reputation makes an edit, it shows up to everyone immediately. If an unregistered user, or a user with less than 2,000 reputation makes an edit, it goes into the review queue first. If the edit is found to be acceptable from review, it gets applied and everyone can see it.
  2. No, it is not possible to prevent edits unless a post is locked, which can only be done by a moderator (someone with a ♦ next to their name).
  3. As the help page states, it's how our site runs. It allows us to maintain our posts as time progresses, and to improve the quality of posts. Users don't necessarily need to understand a post to make a valid edit.

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