Reference Answer:

Extracting XML tags values - Answer

My understanding is that questions and answers are not owned by the authors, but are instead community common or whatever the legal mumbo jumbo is (specifics aren't important here). That being said I've revised about 3,500 questions/answers to improve readability (or other reasons) and in this instance, improved the answer to provide the OP and any future users by providing a link directly to Microsoft documentation.

The user has asked me not to edit his answer(s) although by posting it on SO, it's technically not his answer he's simply the author. I'm not going to start a stupid edit war just because he for whatever reason seems salty/agitated by someone who wants to improve his answer.

It seems unreasonable for anyone to prevent or even ask other SO users to not improve questions or answer, but I'm curious what others think.

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    Funny, he edited it back in soon after... – Heretic Monkey Sep 20 '16 at 22:07
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    why is the link being edited out? how is that an improvement? Ah, i see, he didn't want someone else's name in the edit i guess... I don't see what the big deal is. unnecessary, sure, but... idc – Kevin B Sep 20 '16 at 22:27
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    Experienced SO users tend to quickly shoot off the hip against the "oh no, another case of somebody adding back-ticks" edit case. Which is what the edit in its raw view resembles, on first glance anyway. Lyme disease is virulent at SO. LB is certainly somebody that pays very careful attention to the way he composes his answers. And paid attention after the knee jerk reaction, yay. Nothing went wrong here. – Hans Passant Sep 20 '16 at 22:42
  • Side note: "added 58 characters in body" is not exactly the best explanation of the change... – Alexei Levenkov Sep 21 '16 at 1:52

This is just a misunderstanding.

He thought you changed nothing or that the edit was improper because he couldn't tell what happened. Once it was obvious he made the edit and did include the content you had suggested, but at that point it seems things became very awkward.

I do not think this should be used as an example of a larger pattern, it seems like an isolated incident.


If you plan to make non-trivial (outside spelling/formatting) change on post of active user consider commenting first. If there is no answer in reasonable time (at least couple days) - feel free to edit with good summary.

If user is no longer active on SO - edit and provide non-default edit summary.

For this particular edit - hard to see in particular views change with no description is very suspicions. Non-deleted comments were constructive till Erik tried to impose using particular view to review changes... Good option was to stop after "OK, I added it" comment instead of escalating / generalizing on meta.

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