Is this rollback justified?

Question

I recently made an edit to this question. But it was rolled back a few seconds later. I tried to improve the grammar, rephrased some of the sentences and updated the formatting to make the code more readable. But when I asked in the comments about the rollback, this was the reply made by the OP:

I rolled back because of too few changes (and grammar.. well, it's vague). No sense in this. Because: 1. You've broken my traditional question style. 2. You've put your code style while I prefer to leave mine. Correcting format may be "many letters", but "little sense"

I personally don't think it was a valid reason to rollback. I don't see why anyone should have a "traditional style". In my opinion, a question should just be a question — without any specific styles. And once it's been posted on Stack Overflow, it belongs to the community and is subject to further improvements.

At least, that's the impression I get from reading this Help Center page:

Some common reasons to edit are:

• to fix grammatical or spelling mistakes
• to clarify the meaning of a post without changing it
• to correct minor mistakes or add addendums / updates as the post ages
• to add related resources or hyperlinks

Try to make the post substantively better when you edit, not just change a single character. Tiny, trivial edits are discouraged.

I think this edit qualifies the first two reasons above. I'm asking this just to be sure; was my edit out of line? If not, what's the appropriate course of action now?

Edit:

Just to be clear: I have no personal grudges with the asker, whatsoever. This is meant to be a constructive discussion, and I hope it doesn't offend anyone. Also, please try to make your answers address the issue in general, not specific to this particular case.

Answer 1

The grammatical improvements you made to the post were sound, however I generally advise folks to not touch code in posts, especially if it's the question, unless the formatting that was provided by the author makes the post unreadable.

Edits that:

• Change coding style
• Actually fix bugs in questions (thereby rendering the question moot)
• Drastically change the voice or intent of the author (outside of grammar and spelling)

.. are generally rejected.

In this case, the only 'taboo' thing was the change of style. There are many cases where new users don't realize that we have code blocks, so indenting a big lump of code four spaces to the right is a nice thing to do if they haven't - but leave it at that, especially when it comes to questions.

Answer 2

I totally agree with your edit. It is okay in my opinion because:

1. The post is more readable.
2. The fluff is removed from the title, again making it clearer and more readable.
3. It is easier to evaluate the actual code after adding additional spaces.

The only thing I personally would have left out is changing this:

echo($v);

To:

echo $v;

It does not add much to the readability, etc.

You should also remove the PHP from the title, since tags don't belong there.