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Let me reward a good edit on my question/answer

I love the fact that this site, and the entire SE network are very community driven, but I see a lot of people, answering questions, where multiple answers are very closely related. That's why I'm wondering about a way to encourage people to add to an already great answer using the edit feature, instead of adding their own. Maybe the possibility to vote on edits, so people who contribute to an answer can get some rep from that as well, or something like that.

What do you think would be a good way to do this?

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marked as duplicate by Cody Gray, ChrisF, Time Traveling Bobby, Ladybug Killer, Rick Sladkey Jul 6 '11 at 19:18

This question has been asked before and already has an answer. If those answers do not fully address your question, please ask a new question.

    
    
    
@2: If there is already a correct answer, and you see your answer is wrong: Just delete it. Save the time of the readers. Who needs two identical answers? –  user unknown Jul 6 '11 at 14:50

2 Answers 2

up vote 3 down vote accepted

This gets too complicated. How do you distinguish more or less important corrections or modifications? It has to be easy to find out, who did what, and to split your votes - maybe not everybody agrees, and want's to upvote one part, and downvote another one?

Shall we have a by-sentence voting and maybe one for the whole answer, one for the structure?

And since people want to earn reputation, they will keep going writing new posts for major improvements.

Last but not least: Most programming languages are only reliable if handling integral values of a limited size - else they overrun and produce fancy rounding errors. :) Let's avoid floating point!

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Some ideas:

  • a 'merge comments' flag or option. See my post here: Essential Lawnmower Maintenance I took the initiative and edited in comments to my answer. If there was some way to flag that X comments were merged in for this edit
  • award reputation for edits (might happen already). More rep for accepted edits, less rep for reverted edits

Overall I think its one of those community social things that just has to stick and go on its own. The best way to encourage it is to do edits yourself!

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