Edits to other people's answers

Question

Related to a previous question, but sufficiently different that I think it merits its own discussion.

Now that I've hit 2000 rep I have access to some mod tools, which include the ability to approve or reject edits made by users with less than 1000 rep. There are four outstanding, some of them from a while back.

What should we do with edits like this? I don't seem to have the ability to promote them to answers, so the options are to accept them, reject them, or reject them and summarise the changes in a comment so that the original author can incorporate them or not.

Answer 1

I've found to be trickier on CodeGolf.SE than on other sites.

I'll start by dividing the problem into three groups

1. change only the character count

   These are relatively easy, just check with George's script.

2. change the text, but not the solution

   Substantive edits that don't touch the solution are about the same as on other site. Just check that they really do improve the question in terms of grammar, spelling, usage, clarity, etc.

3. change the solution

   This is the place where I'm stuck. When we were playing on Stack Overflow people generally did not edit each others work, but left helpful comments---your third solution comes down to enforcing that approach.

   I started leaving them under the impression that the authors would be see them and take care of it, but I'm not sure that this is the case.

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Aside: The whle topic makes me feel guilty because I've been studiouly ignoring some of these suggested edits.

Answer 2

Of the three options I've suggested, I favour the third: to add comments summarising the proposed changes for the original authors to deal with. It's not really fair on the people who made the edits, because they won't get any rep, but it's more in line with the way improvements to someone else's answer are proposed in general on this site.

Answer 3

I've seen a few proposed edits where a second, highly related solution is edited into the same answer below the original.

This can perhaps be OK, or is at least safer, since the original is not touched and there is an "alternate" version which the OP can choose to fold into their original answer via editing?

Dunno, just throwing it out there as an idea, since I didn't see it listed in the other answers here.