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I made an edit to my post while leaving the "explain the reason for your edit" part empty. But now I want to add the reason without re-editing the question. Is there a way for this?

Discussion : If not, should there be a way to do this? I think it might be nice, but I'm not sure if it would cause any bug or vulnerability or something.

Edit: Now I think and see one downside of this feature would be that it would require to save the previous edits, so maybe a little bit more database burden. However SE might already be saving them, with edit reviews and such. So it might not be a big deal at all. So I'm adding the "feature-request" tag to the question, also writing my edit reason :)

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  • Actually, if you re-edit within the edit window, you can sort of change the edit reason, I think... I'm not sure how it works I just know that if I edit shortly after posting an edit, the edit reason is already filled in with whatever I'd just used for the edit reason previously... I think there's a 5 minute time window.
    – Catija
    Aug 4, 2015 at 9:50
  • @Catija no, the new summary is not being saved
    – Shadow Wizard Is Sad And Angry
    Aug 4, 2015 at 10:03

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No, you can't change the edit reason once you've committed the edit. After that you need to make another change to edit the edit reason.

Should there be a way to do this?

I have had some times I had really want this, for example I added a tag, then realized something different and edited and forgot to update the explanation. Then I wanted to add why the edit was important, and I couldn't. This is a piece of useful information you want to retain. I think it should be possible and I can't see a way to abuse this.

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  • Exactly my thoughts! I wonder if I can turn this into a feature request :) Will it help getting the "upper" people's attention if I add the tag "feature-requests" to the question?
    – jeff
    Aug 4, 2015 at 9:31
  • @halilpazarlama Yes, just change the tag.
    – Patrick Hofman
    Aug 4, 2015 at 9:34
  • There's no way to abuse it if and only if one is replacing an empty reason with some commit message. Editing commit messages later can be tricky. It's somewhat like the privilege to "edit history" - too dangerous to be available to normal users.
    – Deer Hunter
    Aug 4, 2015 at 10:07
  • @DeerHunter good point. So just allowing to add an explanation if it's empty would be a good idea.
    – jeff
    Aug 5, 2015 at 6:29
  • @DeerHunter if you can only change your own edits edit reason in the grace period, no harm is done.
    – Patrick Hofman
    Aug 5, 2015 at 6:31

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