I participated in a chat discussion that created some animosity about this:
- User A posts an answer.
- User B edits it with a radical change.
- User A approves the change.
- User C rollbacks it because it was a radical change.
I am not any of those users, but in this discussion, I became some sort of lawyer for user A. I was arguing the reason for the rollback with user C. Between a lot of chat messages, user C said in chat:
I am a member of the community. SE is run by the community. I will gladly rollback any invalid or incorrectly used edit, no matter who the approver may be.
I replied this:
Well if someone edited my answer in a way that I approved, it is my answer after all, isn't it? And by the way there is a good reason that SE is designed in a way that if the author of a post approves an edit, it does not needs further approval.
He replied this:
"it is my answer afterall" No, now it's licensed under Creative Commons. It is by no means your property anymore. And by the way there is a good reason that SO is designed in a way that allows rollbacks.
My reply:
I am still the author though. Being licensed under Creative Commons don't means that I am not the author and that I can't decide if I approve modifications to my work or not that are published with my name.
After some more talk:
By the way, I could argue that you are instead, censoring what the author approved as part of his work under the Creative Commons License.
Another guy (E) posted this:
Uh... do you want to read CC-BY-NA again? As an author of a post on SE, you licence your content to the community. Please read the editing help page again...
User A answered:
"radical changes ... are starting to be incentived to be censored" Good! That's how it's supposed to be. Edits are not, not, and NOT meant for radical changes. Anyway, I'm leaving now.
So, what is the correct way to handle this? Should the edit to the answer be rolled back just because it was substantive, even if the answer's author approved it?
What if user A reposts the content posted by user B? Or rolls back to B's revision?