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I made my first attempt at editing a question to help get it answered. The edit can be found here: https://stackoverflow.com/review/suggested-edits/7174232

The edit simply takes some code from a comment (which, as a comment was unformatted and impossible to read), and added it as a code block to the question. My intent was just to help make the question more relevant. The editing guidelines say that a common reason to make an edit is to include information only found in the comments.

My edit was rejected with two votes of:

"This edit was intended to address the author of the post and makes no sense as an edit. It should have been written as a comment or an answer."

And one vote of:

"This edit deviates from the original intent of the post. Even edits that must make drastic changes should strive to preserve the goals of the post's owner."

Am I missing something? What was wrong with my edit?

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    Reviewers can get a little trigger happy when rejecting. Subtitle the code block addition with a bold comment like Addendum: Code added from OP's comment below to make sure they understand your addition. I try to look at the reviewer's reason for editing before looking at the substance of the edit but as soon as I see a large amount of code added, I've got to see a reason not to reject the edit. – user4039065 Feb 28 '15 at 1:55
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    @Jeeped No, such lines don't belong in the post at all, let alone in bold. It's like putting “EDIT: …” in the body of a post. The reason for edit should be stated in the edit summary and nowhere else. If the reviewers don't read or don't understand the edit summary, their poor decision is on them. – user3717023 Feb 28 '15 at 3:17
  • My main reason for asking my question is that I'm trying to feel my way around suggested edits. I follow certain tags fairly closely because of the subject matter, and would love to help people who are just bad at asking questions to write better questions (kind of a win-win as it helps them and anyone else later to get an answer). I just feel like after this first attempt things just get shot down way too quickly for no reason and I don't want to bother. I feel like this isn't the intended spirit of stack overflow. – nbering Feb 28 '15 at 3:23
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Well, the reason that it was rejected is presumably because the reviewers didn't notice the revision comment.

That said, the post seems to be in pretty darn bad shape, even after your edit. You should really focus on editing questions that are salvageable, rather than trying to polish turds. Having said that, I've added the code to the question anyway.

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    Thanks. While I agree that it was in pretty bad shape, it has a tag of interested to me, and I like to help out wherever I can to develop knowledge in that area. – nbering Feb 26 '15 at 22:10
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    @Balrog30 Then find questions that can actually be saved to try to work on, rather than spending a whole bunch of time fixing up a question that is still completely unanswerable and of very low quality even after you've put a bunch of time into it. At that point you're basically just wasting you're time, you're not actually helping the author get an answer when the question is still unanswerable. – Servy Feb 26 '15 at 22:11
  • Which suggests using the votehammer (downvoting) instead of editing (below 3000 reputation points)? – Peter Mortensen Feb 28 '15 at 9:18
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    @Balrog30, Notice the difference between Servy's edit and your edit. You wrote: "Here is some code:" Servy wrote: "This is the code that I have so far." Servy appended the code just like he was the original author Tanya. His edit makes it clearer that the code came from Tanya, and not him. In other words, do not be afraid of impersonating the original author, if you're just cutting and pasting things from their own comments. – Stephan Branczyk Mar 1 '15 at 18:58
  • @StephanBranczyk Thank you very much. That is an excellent and constructive comment. – nbering Mar 1 '15 at 19:02
  • "polish turds". – Registered User Mar 1 '15 at 19:26

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