Was this really a valid edit and answer?

Question

I saw this question come up in the front page and was about to jump on it with a close vote as off-topic (not to mention that the OP could have found the answer in 2 seconds with google or the relevant manpage).

I was surprised to see it had been edited, and then answered, by a high rep user.

If I'd seen that edit come up in the edit review queue I would have rejected it as too minor, because a) the question itself was poor quality / off topic and needed closing rather than editing b) the edit did not address substantial issues in the post, in fact it didn't even tidy up all the grammar / language issues, only some of them!

Am I misunderstanding the way to deal with these kinds of questions? I kind of assume that if @unwind has such a high rep as that, he's more likely to be right on this than I am! Of course I don't mean to pick on @unwind at all personally, but this was a good example of something where I'd like to know what is the "right" way to handle this kind of question.

(This falls close to the "don't polish a turd" question)

Answer 1

I would like to point out that a user's reputation only tells us how good they are in answering questions under the tags they are actively involved in. Reputation does not indicate if the user actually is capable of making good judgement calls about suggested edits/reviews.

In my personal opinion, I would say that question is not constructive rather than off topic. It is still a programming question but shows utter lack of effort from OP. As the answer seems to point out, the command itself is documented in manual. Answering these kind of questions encourages others who are lazy enough to do any search on the web to ask more of these questions.

Answer 2

The fact a high reputation user edited the question, and answered it doesn't mean the edit was correct, nor that the question should not be closed.

If I were the one to edit that question, I would have corrected everything in the question. As for answering, I would probably not have done it, but I would have voted to close it as too localized. After all, since the question is asking something already said in the documentation that comes with the command, it would not probably help any future readers.