Clarify an easily misunderstood editing reason in /help/editing

Question

https://meta.stackexchange.com/help/editing

An example reason to edit is:

To include additional information only found in comments, so all of the information relevant to the post is contained in one place

I recently ran into a subtlety with this editing reason. A user had added a comment to an answer, clarifying an explanation. I found this clarification useful, and from the votes, I presume other people did too.

So I submitted an edit suggestion, adding this information to the post.

This edit was rejected, and when I inquired why it was, I got the following explanation from a moderator for why the example given in the help page is not applicable in this case:

Not third party comments. The only source of information in a post should be the post's author.

Full context, in case I missed some important info (But I'm specifically not interested in what the correct thing to do in this case is. I want the help centre text to be less easy to misunderstand) And to be very clear: I have no objections to the edit being rejected because it was the right thing to do. There may even be multiple other reasons to reject it. But since an easy to understand (once you know it!) reason exists to not make the edit, this could all have been avoided.

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This is an easy mistake to make! The correct interpretation of the editing reason requires one to deduce that "additional information only found in comments" means additional information by the post author, which is not a deduction I managed to figure out.

Could this example be reworded to make it less likely to interpret it in a way that implies relevant information could be added regardless of who wrote it?

Answer 1

Editing has both clear rules and general guidelines, sometimes those criteria aren't entirely clear-cut and perhaps they can't be.

For example, if you do 24 edits/day on Stack Overflow spread out evenly over a 24 hour period hardly anyone will notice the bumps on the main page. But on smaller sites like meta.SE users rely on the activity tab of the main page to keep track of recent events...Meaning if anyone edited/bumped 10 posts in 1 day that would cause a disturbance to the readers. Now compare that in volume with SO, if you were limited in number that way practically nothing could get edited...(The simple guideline is no bulk-editing in short periods, and even that may be necessary during burninations.)

In the specific case of the edit you mention...The comment feels somewhat like an afterthought or an accessory to the objective straight-to-the-point short answer. It is a good comment but arguably can stay as a comment. Here it's hard to formulate a clear-cut rule because it depends subtly on how the question itself scopes the answers.

If the OP decided to give a short-answer I don't see the comment adding vital technical information that isn't by itself evident or easy to deduce (a strong criteria on SO for editing 3rd party comments into posts - and even that can't realistically be done when you have a dozen relevant technical comments).

(Think about it, if you had a hard rule to add comments to the post bodies shortly we'd see all kinds of tangential info getting edited into posts.)

So I venture to say in this case the mod made the right call, although synthesizing these vague guidelines into a clear set of hard rules might not be possible or even desirable. My advice to copy-editors who don't have the 2k privileges is to suggest edits they feel will be consensual with the reviewers and not to worry too much even if a good edit should be reject on occasion.