19

Last night I came across this question in the First Posts Review Queue:

What do I need to do when getting "not enough storage spaces" message?

Being a Fallout Shelter player myself and having experienced the same frustration as the OP, I quickly edited the original post to state more clearly what the actual question was and went on to answer it. The edit later went through peer review and was accepted.

Later I found out, to my surprise, that another user, with rights to edit posts without peer review, rolled back my changes and, with help of others, closed the question as unclear.

Well, the original question was already pretty clear to me. My edit made it stand on its own. Still, it gets rolled back and closed?

So, my question for Meta.Arqade is: as an editor, do I have the flexibility to edit a question like this one, to make it stand on its own, so it's more useful to others, even if I have to read between the lines to get the actual meaning of the OP?

I still think that the meaning was originally clear, but being a new editor, I wanted to check with you what the proper course of action is.

7
  • 5
    because you added the question that was although implied wasn't explicitly stated which people around here don't seem to like doing for some reason.
    – Aequitas
    Sep 16, 2015 at 4:29
  • I voted to close the original question because it's not actually a question, it's a run on statement. Fixing grammar.spelling/formatting is all well and good, but pulling a question from "between the lines"... your energy is better spent elsewhere.
    – GodEmperorDune
    Sep 16, 2015 at 4:49
  • 1
    Related: meta.gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/10816/…
    – user101016
    Sep 16, 2015 at 8:28
  • @Ricardo it was a similar issue that caused me to basically leave Arqade a year or so ago: meta.gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/10033/…. I'm back here today and browsing because of asking a question, but I've given up on helpful stuff like editing or answering questions.
    – Flyto
    Sep 26, 2015 at 9:07
  • Sorry to hear that you left, @SimonW. Contributions like yours are valued here at Arqade and in SE/SO in general. People with the right attributes and attitudes are hard to come by but easy to lose in our environment. But I agree with you that sometimes edit rejections, downvotes and close votes causes grief and makes us want to leave. That's why these privileges must be used with care and when absolutely necessary and well justified. But overall, I think that Arquade is one of the best, more friendly stacks in SE/SO. Maybe it just need a tiny correction here and there...
    – Ricardo
    Sep 26, 2015 at 12:04
  • By the way, @SimonW, I see that you're almost at 2k rep points. If you gather a few more points and reach that level, you'll be able to attend to the Suggested Edits Review Queue. You're help there would be very valuable! Perhaps you'd even be able help other reviewers to understand and value more the work of editors like you and me. Think about it! We would love to have you back!
    – Ricardo
    Sep 26, 2015 at 12:08
  • 3
    @ricardo Oh, I'm active on other SE sites. I find gaming to be the worst out of those I've been involved with for compulsive closing/rejecting/etc and rules-lawyering. Perhaps unsurprisingly, since it's full of gamers ;-)
    – Flyto
    Sep 26, 2015 at 12:08

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
11

I've seen this come up quite a bit recently and it bothers me when very solid guesses about what the question is really asking get rejected simply because we can't be 100% sure that it's what the asker meant.

Yes, it's true, we shouldn't drastically alter a question to be another question entirely. But this, and many other cases I've seen, don't do that. They use their knowledge of the game and context of the question to make an edit that's highly likely to be exactly what the asker wanted. This is good. This is what we want.

If the original user doesn't like the edit, they can always roll it back themselves. If, after the edit, it attracts some answers that are now going to be invalid after the original user rolls it back, they can always just ask a new question which attempts to be clearer than the first time they asked.

By flatly ignoring the likelihood that the edit is correct, and simply saying "But we can't know for sure, so we should just close this and make the OP fix it" we're doing the following:

  • Assuming the editor didn't have a good reason to believe their edit was correct.
  • Creating a poor experience for the OP, who in the case of most of these questions is a new user. This often drives them to leave.
  • Denying the site of useful content.

The downsides are:

  • In the cases where the editor's good guess was wrong, we might confuse the OP. But they will probably still see the intentions of the edit were good. That's not a feeling they typically get when their question is closed.
  • Not a thing I particularly believe in, but I've heard people complain that this "coddles" new users and won't "teach them to use the site correctly". Frankly, I think that line of reasoning is hogwash.

We're supposed to be experts

We're all supposed to be game experts here, so really, edits like these come down to two things, to me.

  1. Don't make them if you don't have a very good reason to believe that your framing of the question is the correct one.
  2. Don't roll them back unless you have a very good reason to believe the editor was wrong.

Editing "just because" or rolling back "just because" is a bad idea. Leverage your gaming knowledge when making or rolling back these edits. That's what we're here for... to share our knowledge, not enforce arbitrary rules.

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .