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I have seen a number of edits on the review screens that are adding a significant amount of new content, items which can and (imho) should be free standing answers to given questions in and of themselves.

How should we as a community handle these?

My apologies if this has been covered before - I looked around on meta but didn't see anything that quite fit.

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  • If it's good steal it for yourself :)
    – user9517
    Jul 11, 2014 at 19:49

2 Answers 2

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If the answer is not community wiki, which invites such edits, then I reject them. The usual reject reason I use is "radical change".

radical change

A suggested edit I just saw in the queue makes a great example. This was completely new content that was different and unrelated to the existing answer, and should have been posted as its own answer.

The person who originally posted the answer may have had a reason for not including the content, other than not knowing about it. Such edits cause the user's answer to be something significantly different than what the user intended.


There are two circumstances in which I might approve such an edit:

  1. If the answer is CW, as I already mentioned.
  2. If the suggested edit is obviously posted by the same user, but from a different account. (It's not terribly uncommon for new users to get confused and create multiple accounts.)
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  • That was exactly the one that got me thinking abot this today as well. Thanks of the sanity check. Jul 11, 2014 at 18:56
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I think we should encourage them to put in their own, but insofar as they're not changing the basic premise of the answer, more power to them. If they want to give up that rep, that's their loss.

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