Related to the recent question about edited questions obsolescing answers. In that case, there was a clarification added to the question that nullified my answer; it was deleted (and I probably should have done so myself). That’s fine.
But I have seen cases where an edit to the question doesn’t seem “fair” – the querent didn’t merely forget to include a detail that changes whether given answers are appropriate, they changed their mind, apparently, about what it was they wanted to ask. In one case that comes to mind, there was a switch from one system tag to another, for example, after there were a lot of (very good) answers to the question based on the original system, that no longer applied at all.
To my mind, that edit, and similar such edits, shouldn’t be made. If I found myself in such a situation, I’d just ask the new question; there’s nothing wrong, to my mind, with having a question that I didn’t end up needing. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the edit, if it is made, should be reverted by someone else – I’m not sure I’d go that far.
So I ask what the community thinks. Is there ever a point where an edit to a question is invalid, and should be reverted and the asker told to ask it as a separate question?
Alternatively, is there any decent way we can “port” existing well-written answers to a new question that asks, well, what they were originally asking? I mean in a somewhat automated sense, not hoping each answerer sees what happened and ports the question himself (and risking the mess that occurs when multiple answerers do this and don’t notice each other doing it, so we have a separate question for each answer)?
