Tip pages: to edit or to add?

Question

I recently posted a lengthy edit to a tip (not my own) in the VBA tips for golfing page

I posted as an edit rather than a new answer because the tip's scope was broad enough that I felt my answer would best be placed as an amendment. The edit was rejected by the community and so I'm here asking for advice;

• When should you edit someone else's post, specifically on a tips page?
• Can you add a subtopic or should this be posted separately?

Or, in short, what was the reason that my edit was marked with

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.

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For reference:

• The edit (I'm not sure if you can see it) is this one

• The post was this one on the VBA tips for golfing

• If you can't see the edit, I essentially outlined some special characters for Print calls that may be useful in reducing their size.

That seems to me to fit nicely as an addition to that specific tip - if I was the post owner I probably would have lumped them all in together as one tip (one post one tip as stated in the question). But I'm never sure what the etiquette is for editing answers to general help pages rather than specific questions.

Answer 1

This answer is a expansion on my comment on the original post. If it has been deleted for some reason here is the body of the original comment.

I was one of the people that rejected your edit. I felt like it provided a lot of new information. I would recommend editing for minor changes or corrections and commenting or adding a new answer if you want to add new information or expand on existing tips.

This is more or less a TL;DR of my thoughts on this matter as a whole. In my opinion edits, for both tips and for other challenges, should be used for tweaks, fixes and corrections. Examples might include:

• Grammar or spelling correction

• Reformatting

• Minor correction (miscounted bytes etc.)

Edits should not change the content of the answer. These should for the most part left as comments and in some cases should be made into their own answers.

In your case you add a lot of helpful information to the answer. I see this a lot like golfing someones answer through an edit. It makes the answer better but it changes the content of the answer. I thus reviewed your edit in the same way as I would a golfing edit. For minor improvements, just like minor golfs, I would leave a comment, here's an example where I have done that. For larger more complex improvements like your own I would suggest making a whole new answer touching on the original answer but focusing on the tips you in particular are offering. Here's an example of that happening (the old answer has been deleted because the new one subsumes it).

This allows people to vote on the content you are providing separately from the original content and allows you to get rep for your contributions if people think it is helpful. In my opinion its a win win scenario.