On editing somebody else's off-topic question to make it on-topic without the owner's word

Question

Recently a user joined the site asking a question that was an equivalent of the routinely closed, "hey guys please solve my homework for me". Here's the specific question I'm talking about. An existing user then proceeded to edit the question to make it more fitted to our site, and I voted to reopen the challenge due to this fact.

When asking in The Nineteenth Byte the overall consensus was that a challenge should not be edited to alter the original poster's intent. My few questions pertaining to this topic would be:

• Is it okay to take a malformed "closed" challenge from a new user like this and repost it as your own in a valid format?
• Is it okay to edit the question to make it 'valid' maintaining the original user's intent of solving the problem but making it relevant to our site?

My main discussion point here is:

• A new user posts a question without knowing the rules of the site.
• The question is actually a nice challenge that's not a dupe.
• The question is off-topic for one reason or another and gets closed.
• What do we do if we want the challenge, but well-formed?

Discuss correct courses of action please.

Answer 1

Stop editing programming questions to make them on-topic

Note that this is solely my opinion about the problem. In case the post was initially a general programming question, I think we should not edit them to make them on topic for the following reason:

• Although (usually) obnoxiously inefficient and esoteric, the answers here still provide some sort of reference for the OP to use when solving their homework / whatever else they want to solve.

• This incentivizes posting off-topic, programming-related help questions, which is not ok.

• The poster is then rewarded through upvotes, thanks to a significant edit made by another user, and this might make them think it's perfectly fine to just post a question which is then edited by someone else, and eventually also answered in a manner that is at least somewhat helpful to them.

We should close such questions as off-topic and leave them closed, without bothering to make them on-topic by editing. But we should still be welcoming to the new user and explain why the question is not well-received, and how things work around PPCG, additionally pointing them towards the Sandbox. After we provide all the necessary information, we might want to ask the OP if they want to reword their question themselves to make it on-topic (this would be perfectly fine, I think). If they don't want to modify their post or don't reply to the comments after a certain threshold (e.g. a couple of days), some other member of the community can take over their challenge and post it separately, of course mentioning the original post.