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I have asked a question and it was recently (a couple of hours ago) edited so much that it was no longer "recognisable".

What I mean by this is the editor has edited the question so much that it was practically a different question, they have removed information that provided context because they thought I was "trolling" (?)...

Any ways my question is about a serious as it gets. And quite frankly, I wouldn't bother asking if it was a "troll question".

I have rolled back to the last edit before this one. Now the problem is that the user that edited my question has much more reputation than me ~5-6 thousand more reputation points and if he wants he can re-edit my question without my approval.

What can I do about this?

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  • @RichardU I think you might have misread the edit history. enderland did not actually edit his question, he just protected it because ... surprise, surprise ... HNQ! :)
    – Masked Man
    Commented Mar 3, 2017 at 17:25
  • Seems yesterday's edit also rendered my answer somewhat invalid as it does not address the new question.
    – Erik
    Commented Mar 3, 2017 at 18:20
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    "What can I do about this?" other than coming here to Meta and complaining, there doesn't seem to be anything to prevent people with sufficient reputation from editing the life out of any question they choose. That seems to be the way the system is designed. I'm not sure why that design was chosen.
    – Joe Strazzere
    Commented Mar 3, 2017 at 23:30
  • If they accept your rollback then no harm done in my opinion. If they re-edit then flag it for moderator.
    – paparazzo
    Commented Mar 6, 2017 at 15:25
  • Why are the details being removed so important to your question? Does the condensed question not cover it completely. Questions here are intended to help others in the future with similar problems so if a question can be made more generally applicable with out changing the core of your question that should be encouraged. (as others said calling you a troll was a violation of the Be Nice policy you should flag that.
    – IDrinkandIKnowThings
    Commented Mar 6, 2017 at 17:04

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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Do not get into an edit war. If other users are repeatedly making unwanted edits to your question, flag the question for moderator attention and explain the situation. In this particular question, you could explain why those additional details that are being removed are actually relevant and important to the question. Moderators here are very reasonable, and they will certainly handle the situation well.

As an aside, I agree that calling you a "troll" was unnecessary. The points you made are fairly reasonable, and we do not have any evidence to decide that you are just making stuff up.

Be aware though, that in the general case, your posts belong to the community, and anyone is free to edit them if such an edit would be useful to the community.

Also, some other SE sites give the impression of high reputation users running a fiefdom, but here on The Workplace, everyone right from a newbie to a diamond moderator is bound by the community rules, so reputation doesn't really give you any advantage besides the privileges that come by design.

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There is no way to prevent people editing. So if you don't like the edit just roll it back, takes a few clicks of the mouse. Hopefully the editor gets the picture without you needing to do anything else. It's worked for me anyway.

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