Was it correct to roll this edit back?

Question

I reviewed this question where the edit was adding missing parentheses and brackets to source code . Since the OP's description of what was wrong was so vague of but am unable to make it work and What am i doing wrong above? I thought it may be possible that the missing brace was relevant to their question.

The edit was approved 3-2 so I rolled it back and made the typo fixes that the suggested edit had made. Was this the correct thing to do or should I have agreed with the majority of the reviewers?

Answer 1

I would say the rollback was a fair one. I see no indication anywhere in the question or comments that we're dealing with a copy-paste error. And as you say, the rather vague description of the problem might well leave room for these assumed typos to be the problem at hand.

In such a situation I prefer to point out that flaw to the OP in a comment. More often than not the response is "oh yeah, sorry, that's my mistake copying it", after which the OP edits the code. That would be the correct procedure to follow in my opinion. Correcting the code without such prior verification is not.

Answer 2

In this question, all we knew is that the asker “am unable to make it work”. This could have been caused by a syntax error causing the code not to be executed. So the edit should have been rejected as “radical change” (an edit to a question must not invalidate answers that are likely to help the asker), and you were right to roll it back.

If it had been clear that the missing last line was a copy-paste error, the edit would have been a good one. For example, if a question states that a program compiles but doesn't run as desired, and the posted source is missing a final brace, adding that final brace is a good edit.