12

Disclaimer: This might come off as a rant against a rejected edit at first, but rest assured that that is not my intention.

I revisited a rather old answer I stumbled upon once and took issue with its wording, as it effectively reads like a comment to OPs question that was posted as an answer. Since it got accepted it seems to have done the job nevertheless.

After thinking about it for a while, I figured it would be best to transform that into a more authoritative answer to make it less comment-esque. I suggested this edit.

The feedback was quick and unanimous: Rejected.

Seemingly I should have left a comment for the answerer to edit his own post. Point taken, that seems to be a reasonable approach, I just did not know it was the preferred course of action.

But, and that is the real reason for this question (sorry for the long winded approach), at which degree of poster inactivity does it become more reasonable to edit it directly than to hope they raise out of hiatus and take action? The poster in question has apparently logged in in September, but has not posted an answer or question since June 2014.

To avoid future mistakes on my part like this, is there some agreed-on timeframe where a poster is not believed to return to edit his own post?

0
15

This is what reputation really means. When you have enough of it then you are implicitly trusted to make sweeping changes like that. Albeit that it is still subjected to the scrutiny of other SO users that are active in the tag, they'll see the edited Q+A back on their front page and can easily reject it by rolling it back.

But when you don't have enough of it then people look over your shoulder more thoroughly, not trusting you yet to get it right. And with an option to give you feedback why the edit wasn't correct, note how a rollback doesn't have that feature. And they almost always reject such a drastic rewrite, not in the least because they are not usually experts in the tag that can judge accuracy. And the older the post, and thus the less likely the original author is still around, the less likely they'll think it is a good idea to change the post. After all, it has survived for this long without edits, it can't be so bad that it needs a complete rewrite. Mind you, this is the way the reviewers reason, nothing to do with the specific edit.

You'll get enough rep, soon.

1
  • Though I agree with the answer, I would add two things: One commenting and waiting some (a week?) length of time then adding this to the edit description can help. Two occasionally a higher rep user will see your edit (and its rejection) make a similar change anyway and up-vote one of your posts - as a kind of workaround. So changes get made and you get (more) rep but not credit - so might still be worth the effort (and can certainly go to chatrooms to plead your case if edit is needed badly enough)
    – LinkBerest
    Nov 14 '15 at 1:35
4

The answer from Hans does a good job addressing the rejected-edit issue. However, to that I would add:

  • Consider just posting your own answer to the question. Editing old answers is useful. But when an edit is too drastic, it can easily be considered to "conflict with the original author's intent", no matter how much in need of improving that author's post was.

    In such cases, it's often best to just go ahead and add your own answer. No one can accuse you of writing a brand new post that conflicts with your own intent. :) (Of course, if you base it on the other answer, be sure state clearly what in your own answer is original and what is borrowed.)

There are lots of examples on Stack Overflow of Q&As where the accepted answer has a lot lower score than another, superior answer to the same question. Now's your chance to add another example of that. :)

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