Why do people destroy helpful edits to answers?

Question

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.

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

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.

Answer 3

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.