Is it OK to edit and cut down an overly verbose question to try and make it a more "canonical" question?

Question

I landed upon a question about how to convert CP1251 to UTF-8 in Python, which was helpful to me, but it was overly verbose, taking a screen to ask a question that should have been 1-2 sentences.

So I edited it, with the intention to make it better quality from the POV of a Google searcher landing on this page, but now my edit has been reversed by another user, who thinks that since some of the answers are referencing the overly verbose text, it should be in the old form.

Since I'm not sure if the kinds of editing I made are encouraged or discouraged here, I want to ask the community.

This is how the question looked after I edited it:

I have a string that contains Cyrillic text, but it is encoded in the CP-1251 Windows code page.

How can I convert that string to UTF-8?

This is how it looks now (without my edits) - How to convert a string from CP-1251 to UTF-8?

Edit

I just found this in the StackOverflow blog (thanks Shog9):

It is OK to edit a question to make it more general. With the power of editing comes the power to take someone’s selfish, very specific question, and edit it a little bit until they’re asking the more general question that hundreds of people encounter. For example, if someone asks, “I set up a web server at home but I can’t access it from work,” it’s OK to rewrite the question as, “What things should I check when a web server running at home is not visible on the Internet?” In fact, sometimes selfish, stupid questions of the “do my homework” variety can be easily edited into a form where the answer will provide an extremely valuable resource for the internet at large.

Answer 1

First off, thank you. We need more of this sort of editing on Stack Overflow. Every time I have to scroll past a page of irrelevant question to get to the answer I'm looking for, I get a little bit sick.

That said, when you're making these edits please pay close attention to the answers on the question: often (though not always) they contain references to parts of the question - if those parts of the question are removed, the answers become much harder (even impossible) to understand. I'm afraid that was the case for several answers after your edit here. It is possible you could have edited the answers as well to avoid this problem, but as it stood this made them harder to follow.

In this case, I was able to reduce the length of the question considerably without sacrificing any of the context referenced in the answers. While this may not have mattered for your needs, it is far from unlikely (as Kate notes) that others with similar problems might find this question more effectively if it matches keywords based on the tools they're working with.

Related: The Wikipedia of Long Tail Programming Questions

Answer 2

you removed a number of terms people might be searching on:

• UnicodeDecodeError
• getdefaultencoding
• setdefaultencoding

as well as the point that it works on the Linux system and not on the Windows one. Removing fluff is one thing; removing the kinds of detail we usually have to beg people to add is a different thing. I think it should stay in the longer form.

Answer 3

After the edit, there's no context to the actual problem. That's bad.

What you've done is remove a huge chunk of pertinent information from the original question, namely:

• What the OP's specific problem is, including libraries used
• What the issue is
• What the output they're experiencing is
• What their error is
• How they attempted to fix it the first time

...and you've condensed it into a overly broad one-liner.

An edit should be there to clean up the question without changing the meaning or context; what you've done is rip out a lot of that.

I would strongly discourage those sorts of edits from now on - don't rewrite the question for them in that manner.

Answer 4

In the Editing FAQ, it states (emphasis mine)

•To clarify the meaning of the post (without changing that meaning)

You did clarify the meaning of that post, but it completly changed the intent of that question. It changed a very specific question into a broad one that may have more answers after the edit than before. It also changes a clearly on-topic question into a possibly off-topic question (as it doesn't show any understanding of the problem being solved). That is not what editing should do. The purpose of Stack Overflow is to create questions that others can use, but did your edit really make it easier for people to learn from it? I think not, and it also removes some details that may be important to others and to solving the origional problem.

I don't believe that this edit was needed to clarify the meaning.