Is it appropriate to edit another user's answer to include important information from their own comments?

Question

A suggested edit of mine was recently rejected because

This edit was intended to address the author of the post and makes no sense as an edit. It should have been written as a comment or an answer.

However, my suggested edit was not intended to address the author. It merely incorporated important information that the author of the accepted answer had provided in his own comments. The language is almost entirely his, and the meaning is completely his.

After the answer was posted, the question's author and answer's author went back and forth in its comments. In these comments, the question's author provided important clarification about the question, and the answer's author responded with further answers to address these clarifications. This discussion greatly improved the quality of the question and the accepted answer.

I have already successfully edited the question to incorporate its author's clarifying comments. In its current form, the answer by itself no longer satisfies the requirements of the question, and it includes obsolete requests for clarification. The edit I suggested incorporates the answer's author's excellent follow-up information, making the answer stand alone as both correct and complete.

Was this edit appropriate? If so, how should I have ensured that it would be accepted, and is there anything I can do now that it has already been rejected (e.g., resubmit the edit with a revised edit comment)? The comment I originally provided was

"Including important information found only in comments and removing first sentence (a request for clarification made obsolete by edit to the question)"

If this edit in particular was not appropriate, are actions like these ever appropriate, and under what circumstances? What is the best approach in a situation like this?

Answer 1

According to this page in the help center, putting information from comments into a post is a good reason to edit. In my opinion, edits like those are great edits.

From that help center page:

Common reasons for edits include...[t]o include additional information only found in comments, so all of the information relevant to the post is contained in one place

To make sure the edit won't be rejected, it might be a good idea to write something like

Incorporated important info from comments

in the edit summary.

But....that's how it works on my sites (mostly Mi Yodeya), I don't know how Math works.

You might want to have a chat with the reviewers who rejected your edit in the site's chat room, to see if you can figure out what happened; without reading the question, answer, and comments, I can't know what happened ( I likely won't; I'm no math person ).

As a reviewer, if I see that someone left a comment like that, I will click on the "link" link on the side of the page to see who said what comments, to see if the edit was appropriate.

( One note: make sure that the comments are from the OP; if they're not, then they don't belong in the post. I recall one instance in which I rolled back an edit like that because the info came from comments on a question that didn't belong to the OP. )

Answer 2

As Shokhet mentioned, edits like these are generally encouraged.

One thing you may want to do differently is to emphasize you're incorporating comments from the author of the post in your edit description. If you look at the suggested edit review, the comments aren't really visible in that review queue.

Some reviewers take the time to open up the post and they'll see that you're editing in information the author provided, but as you've found out, others...don't. Instead, they might think you're adding information provided by other people into someone's answer, and edits like that generally are less well received.

To increase your chances of having your edit approved you might try something like:

Incorporated additional information from the author left in the comments