Enchantment Property Spell edit concern

Question

This answer was recently edited, by another user. I am concerned with the edit for a number of reasons, but primarily it is the fact that they have changed a substantial portion of the substance of the answer after that answer has been accepted.

Is this a reasonable concern? If so, what is the most appropriate way of handling this? My initial reaction was that the edit should be rolled back, with a comment left to the person who attempted the edit asking them to provide their own answer if they disagree with this one. Thoughts?

Answer 1

This is a tricky situation.

By all accounts, the first version of the answer - which was accepted - had some pretty incorrect statements in it. (This is why you don't accept answers within a day, people!) It should have, accordingly, been downvoted.

Andras's edit was definitely an improvement. But it was also an edit that was too major, outright replacing a significant portion of the original answer. In this case, Andras should probably not have edited it this way and it probably shouldn't have been approved: Andras should have downvoted, and posted their own answer.

In this circumstance though? Probably just leave it as is and avoid making this situation messier. I'll leave a comment on the answer letting Andras know about this.

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On this note, though: sometimes people perform a too-major edit on a bad (but accepted) answer, and explain they wouldn't normally have done it, but it was the accepted answer, and that one should be correct, right?

Don't do this. Accepted answers don't get special treatment. If it's wrong or a bad answer, downvote it, then post your own, better answer. If the answer with a tick beside it has a low or negative score, and it's followed by one with a much better score, they'll get which one's the better answer.

Answer 2

I would say that asking the editor to post his own answer and rolling the already accepted answer back to its accepted state would be best. The asker accepted the answer for a reason.

If the answer had not been accepted I would say that in this specific case the answer was edited to such a high degree that a roll back would also be appropriate, that amount of editing, in my opinion, warrants a new answer as they basically rewrote the entire thing.

If the edit was correcting grammar, punctuation, spelling or even just 1 or 2 small errors I would say let the edit stand, if the answer was not the accepted answer.

Answer 3

I was the editor of the answer.

First I downvoted it, and started to give my answer, when I realized there is nothing wrong with the answer itself. It said what needed to be said, just the examples were totally bad.

I debated just deleting the examples, they were not an essential part of the answer.

Then I realized the question was fairly basic, so if he had to ask that, the asker probably needed examples.

So after this process modifying the answer was the logical step, but I understand how the end result was wrong.

I will give an independent answer next time.