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Many times I see that when an user edits his own answer he notify it with an heading like this:

Edit

content added to the previous version of the answer

I don't like it very much because in my opinion this make the answer more ugly. And I think that it is more useful to integrate the content, adjusting the part without any heading. I don't know if this is not a good practice, and I imagine that someone can think that with the edit heading it is easier to see the improvements and that the previous up-vote refers to the original question, but in fact I think that this does not make much sense. What is the best practice?

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    Often I just use this to show what has changed. Sometimes when questions become moving targets, it's the easiest way to point at your changes.
    – Patrick Hofman
    Commented Apr 29, 2014 at 12:40

1 Answer 1

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Messages like that do not belong in the post body. They belong in the edit reason, which is visible on the revision history page. That is exactly what that reason is there for - to identify why a change was made.

An edited post already has a link to the revision history as well as who edited it last and when. There's no need to keep track of its history in the post when a user could just look at the history and see what changed.

Remove lines like this whenever you see them.

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    Further, don't edit posts just by adding new information at the end. The post should always be coherent as if it were written afresh -- integrate your changes into the post; don't concatenate.
    – Monica Cellio
    Commented Apr 29, 2014 at 19:42
  • Who are you that I am mindful of you? (Yes, I know what it says on your profile). I am happy for people to edit my posts for good technical reasons. I get immensely peeved when people edit my posts in order to detract from technical content while adding flowers, perfume, misc stylistic "improvements" [tm] and general extraneous garbage. I place no great store in "rep", but when said abusers have very modest rep on SE overall after 4 + years of membership and to add insult to injury quote this post* of yours in justification it helpeth not a tad. | * Which is why I am here.
    – Russell McMahon
    Commented Mar 29, 2015 at 12:54

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