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Answer in question:

How do you defeat the Sectopod on Commander Difficulty?

I have made an extensive edit to the answer, explaining more mechanics on how to destroy a Sectopod and someone just rejected the edit with the comment I should post it as my answer. But I clearly don't want to do this. Wiki means you edit existing content where appropriate. The person answering helped me solve the problem in the game so it is more than fair that I improve his answer rather than making it my own.

I absolutely do not understand why my edit was rejected. In my opinion, only harmful or too minor edits should be rejected. Same applies to a question I edited before, correcting the error message (which was a standard windows message) and cleaning up the grammar.

Someone else just took my edit and made it their own instead approving my edit. In that case it was even a violation of the Creative Commons License.

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    Take a look at the reject reason: "This edit changes too much in the original post; the original meaning or intent of the post would be lost". You're expanding the answer well beyond what the original answerer gave. In cases like that, it's better to post your own answer.
    – Frank
    Aug 26, 2013 at 16:59
  • Which question are you talking about? But in both cases this reason is wrong.
    – user53721
    Aug 26, 2013 at 16:59
  • The one on the question you linked to. There's a reason users under 2K need their edits reviewed. In this case, it was felt that you were changing too much of the intent of the answer.
    – Frank
    Aug 26, 2013 at 17:02
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    Which is, as I said, wrong. I was taking the answer that was given and expanded it with 2 more methods of defeating a sectopod. And thanks for being so condescending.
    – user53721
    Aug 26, 2013 at 17:05
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    I'm honestly not trying to be condescending. All I'm saying is, you were greatly changing the intent of the answer. If you want to change an existing answer that much, you're better off writing your own answer. What happens if your extra information is wrong? People will downvote the answer, and it will be the original answerer that will pay the price, not you. Likewise with upvotes.
    – Frank
    Aug 26, 2013 at 17:07
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    I saw that you rejected it. Did you even play the game? Do you even own it? I do, so how can you say it was wrong information??? If you would play The Bureau you would know that it is correct what I said. Seriously, if you want people participating here, you shouldn't delete good effort.
    – user53721
    Aug 26, 2013 at 17:09
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    I'm pointing out a scenario as to why we don't often approve such radical edits. Why is it so important that our process be changed to accommodate you? What arguments can you provide that we should allow such?
    – Frank
    Aug 26, 2013 at 17:11
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    My edit was helpful, spoiler free and not wrong. It contained all facts one needs to know to defeat the enemy on the highest difficulty without trouble. If that is enough, then I see no point in providing answers and the wiki tag of this site is clearly misplaced. I feel that this site has the same problems as Wikipedia - a few that basically run the site and force their views on everyone else.
    – user53721
    Aug 26, 2013 at 17:16
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    @leetfan Instead of editing an answer so extensively, just post your own answer. Also, nobody said the information in the edit was wrong, it's just the wrong way to edit.
    – user9983
    Aug 26, 2013 at 17:19
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    @leetfan We are not saying your information was bad, we are telling you that you need to change the format you deliver that information -- post your experiences as a new answer, rather than as an edit to someone else's. There is no limit of one answer per question, nor stigma against answering your own question.
    – Raven Dreamer
    Aug 26, 2013 at 17:20
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    If your edit contained all the facts one needs to know to solve the problem in the question, why wasn't it an answer? An edit is a tool designed for an improvement to the clarity of an existing answer, or to update it based on changing circumstances, not to replace it outright.
    – Sconibulus
    Aug 26, 2013 at 17:21
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    @leetfan One thing to remember about this site, and likely Stack Exchange in general, is that nothing is personal. We strive to maintain certain things and when users for any reason seem to be driving against that, we will remedy it. It has nothing to do with the user, but the site policies. The best place to see that is here in meta. Ask/Propose something within the rules, but just know that down-votes and debate are there to improve the site, not bring users down.
    – Batophobia
    Aug 26, 2013 at 17:38
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    In regards to your other edit, and the actual edit made right after, by one of the rejecters, yeah, that looks like bad form on their part.
    – Frank
    Aug 26, 2013 at 17:58
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    @fbueckert I agree. That was a situation that would benefit from the "Improve" option, but rejecting it outright only to copy it after is pretty much abusing the privilege.
    – Niro
    Aug 26, 2013 at 19:20
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    @leetfan I think the main thing to keep in mind is what fbueckert points out: that the reputation for the answer is associated with the person who originally provided it. For better or for worse, this makes folks possessive of their answers (and questions), and it means that even though it may look weird and redundant, you are better off creating your own "super answer", than editing someone else's unless the edits are very minor. You can always link back to their answer with the "share" button, and that is a common practice.
    – EBongo
    Sep 1, 2013 at 20:35

3 Answers 3

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Your edit was rejected because it changed too much of the answer. The only words that are the same between the two answers are "to" "a" and "Hope this helps". You replaced the original answer with yours.

Questions can have multiple answers, and the users of the site will upvote the most correct and useful answers. You, as the question asker, have the ability to mark one answer as the one that helped you, even if you provided that answer yourself.

Also, regarding the wiki nature of this site - while all questions and answers can be edited, the number one rule when editing is to respect the original author. It is their name that is attached to the post and their reputation at stake, so we do not allow anyone to make massive changes to posts.

So, please provide your answer as a new answer to the question, not as an edit to an existing answer.

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You ask:

I absolutely do not understand why my edit was rejected

The answer is in the rejection reason: the edit was too radical. But it seems your real question is something like "okay, it's a big change, but it adds useful information, why reject such edits?" And you also add "Wiki means you edit existing content where appropriate".

And the answer to that is that this site is not a wiki.

It has some wiki-like aspects - in particular, these kinds of stuff are meant to be community-edited (and also notice their names):

  • "Tag wikis" - the short and long description of tags
  • Answers marked as "community wiki"

And we also facilitate a very simple mechanism for editing regular questions and answers, similar to wiki sites. But you are not supposed to radically edit them, as you should in a wiki site - instead, this is intended for fixing formatting, typos, small mistakes, etc. That's just the way we work.

"But why is that the way you work?" you may ask - well, because the main goal of this site is not to create pages with comprehensive information, as wikis try to do. The main goal is to answer the questions asked - preferably, as directly as possible. This is also the reason for encouraging multiple answers and with the ability to vote between them - because we want to make sure the thing that was most helpful to others appears right there at the top of the page, to provide an answer as quickly as possible, without reading tons of information.

Now, this does not mean you should avoid writing long, comprehensive answers - just keep in mind that you write an answer, not a wiki page. And if you look at existing answers and find them lacking, the correct approach is to post an alternative. This also plays well with our reputation system, as fbueckert has written above - by keeping answers separate, not only are they voted on separately, they also affect the reputation of their owners separately.

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    And again, questions are not limited to a single answer! Questions can have as many answers as is deemed useful by other users on the site!
    – Raven Dreamer
    Aug 26, 2013 at 17:25
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I was among the people that handled (and rejected) the edit, for the aforementioned reasons: It should really be a new answer. You were changing an existing answer by adding information to it.

That is not the way we go about things here, except for some very specific cases. If you have new or different information, you post a separate answer. In fact, after your edit was rejected (that is, after the second reject vote came in), I gave a comment detailing what you should do instead:

You should be able to post your answer yourself, rather than editing someone else's answer. That's perfectly fine, in fact, self-answering is encouraged. :)

Nobody doubts the validity of your contributed content. The precise reject reason I gave is as follows (emphasis mine):

This edit changes too much in the original post; the original meaning or intent of the post would be lost.

This has nothing to do with whether or not the edit contains correct information. In fact, we have a reason for that, too (at least I believe it fits much better for incorrect information) - and I didn't choose it because it didn't apply:

This edit is incorrect or an attempt to reply to or comment on the existing post.

There's nothing wrong with the content, it's that you edited into someone else's answer, rather than posting one of your own.

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