What right do mods have in reconstructing my answers and comments?

Question

In my answer on question - How does one politely decline a handshake due to religious reasons? - I have an answer that had an entire paragraph chopped out of it.

Not only that but the mods keep deleting my comments in response to other comments BUT KEEP THE ORIGINAL COMMENTS.

Here is the deleted section of my answer:

Addendum: We must talk about the elephant in the room. There is a massive perception in the US and parts of Europe that Muslim men believe that women are inferior. I am not arguing one way or another on this perception. You can say it isn't true but there will be countless people who will believe it to be true and it only takes one of them to get the author fired from his job. People in the comments say it is his religious obligation not to shake hands. Before commenting please please tell me where the line of religious obligation is drawn and where do you think an employer should draw it? Should an employer allow a white person to have a religious obligation not to shake a black person's hands? Just because it is in a religion doesn't make it right.

Addendum II: US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. This link says absolutely NOTHING. It says that if he refuses to shake hands and if people feel he is discriminate against women it is sexual harassment. If people feel like it he is "good" then it is fine. This is a document you could give to HR - because it says nothing. But this document will not help keep the author from getting fired. Based on this document anyone could perceive the author's intent is discriminatory and fire him.

I fail to see how these are not directly correlated with the author's question.

Also to go along with this please see this comment by Monica below in my answer

Relevant: i.sstatic.net/lMnCX.png – Monica Cellio♦ 3 mins ago

She is telling me to not put comments on my answer that should be in the post. Then deletes those exact things once I put them in the post.

To clarify this question: I do not have an issue with the mods deleting comments. I understand that comments get overwhelming on some questions/answers and need to be deleted. I do have an issue with a mod deleting a comment and then using it as an answer. I do have an issue with the mods picking and choosing which comments to delete. I do have an issue with the mods treating answers from other mods differently than non-mods.

Also I was never given a reason why the sections above were deleted. They were in direct context to the question and other answers. I feel that if the mods are going to make a widespread delete there should be an OBVIOUS reason or they should work with the author on wording. The mods then took this one step further and LOCKED IT DOWN. If you have an upvote on Monica's answer below you did not understand all of the facts. Also I asked Monica to help get comments to prove my issues and she has only went back and retrieved one to help her side.

Answer 1

Ok, first off, it's clear that you feel strongly, but your post makes it seem like you may be letting perceived offenses get the better of you. If you want folks to give you the benefit of the doubt in this situation, you'll do far better by waiting until you can make a calm, rational argument for why things should've been handled differently... Right now, you're coming off as someone who is upset that they weren't allowed to freely rant about something that bothered them, and taking every opportunity to lash out at the people who restrained him - a poor way of handling yourself, here or anywhere else.

Take a walk. Drink a cup of tea. Come back when you've had time to think through this a bit - trust me, it will help.

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Now, to address the rest of your concerns...

What right do moderators have to edit or remove what you've written?

They have the right granted to them by the system and by the folks here who elected them to do exactly that. Indeed, they have not just the right to do so, but the responsibility to do so - they are charged by the community here to maintain a civil forum conducive to the creation of useful answers. Upon being made aware of a post or comment that threatens this order, they must edit or remove it - anything else would be to abdicate the responsibility they were given, to betray those who trusted them.

Now, you can argue that the specific edit wasn't necessary, and if you believe that then perhaps you should lay out your rationale for why the text that was removed was helpful in answering the asker's question (or at very least, not detrimental to this end). But the argument that moderators shouldn't undertake such work is utterly invalid; such work is the very reason why moderators exist, and indeed why all privileged members of the community are trusted with the right to edit, to improve on the work of others such that future readers may learn from it.

If you don't understand why a particular edit was made, why certain comments were removed, why warnings were left or have any other question about moderation here, you're more than free to ask. If you disagree with the rationale, you can bring the matter before the community here. Be honest; be willing to learn. And be willing to accept the decision of the community here, in cases where they disagree with you and side with the moderators they elected.

Most of all, try not to lose sight of the bigger picture: the situation on that question, and on your answer in particular, was quickly degenerating into an inflammatory discussion that did nothing to address the asker's question. Moderators took considerable effort to correct this, while facing a considerable lack of cooperation from some of the people involved. Debating the consistency of specific actions taken is naive; this is a live question and the moderation is ongoing, with actions taken as time and circumstances permit. If you see a problem that hasn't yet been addressed, the most productive thing you can do is to flag it and thus ensure that the moderator team is aware of it.

Reposting a comment as an answer

You brought this up in your answer here; I think you're confused as to what actually happened.

I stopped by briefly yesterday in response to something else, and happened upon a flag in the comments under the question here. Seeing that the comments were largely irrelevant and somewhat inflammatory, I summarily deleted all of them. One of them, which I assume is the one you're referencing, read as follows:

I'm with @Bregalad - Give her a big hug and tell her that you can't shake hands because of your religious beliefs. Haha, but in all seriousness, you can decline but there's not a "polite" way to do it in the US. The constitution that the country was founded on states that all citizens are equal(give or take, this isn't a history lesson) I would suggest if you're going to make that distinction don't shake anyone's hand. People will be more willing to accept that you can't shake anyone's hand as opposed to only women, but even so, that's a slippery slope. – zfrisch

This... Vaguely resembles enderland's initial answer:

An easy way to do this is to not shake hands with anyone.

This avoids the problems related to sexism entirely. You can say something, "I prefer not to shake hands due to my religion" if someone tries to shake your hand.

...insofar as both recommend not shaking hands with anyone. Of course, several other people make the same recommendation in various forms across the other answers and comments; it would appear to be a rather obvious solution to the problem. Given enderland neither borrowed any of the wording nor was involved in the removal of that comment, I don't see any indication of impropriety there.

Answer 2

As I explained in the edit summary, your latest edit just added your strongly-held personal opinions about religion. This is not a constructive change; rather, it degrades the quality of the site. The OP asked a sincere question reflecting a problem that lots of people in the world actually have. Your participation on this question has largely amounted to "that's not a real problem because religion is stupid". That is not acceptable. Your edit wasn't appropriate the first time you made it and it wasn't appropriate the second time, when you rolled back my removal of it. (That is why your answer is now locked.)

As for comments, so far there are approximately 160 deleted comments on the question and its answers. Most of those comments are arguments about religion, discrimination, bigotry, and other participants. None of that has anything to do with answering the OP's question. We will continue to delete stuff like that.

Let's look at the two comments that remain on your answer after the "comments removed" notice:

"You may feel that it is your religious right to not shake a woman's hand". As I read it, OP states that it is his religious obligation - not "right" - not to touch women other than his wife or close family members. – Mawg 7 hours ago

This is a correction of an assertion in your answer.

There is no such thing as a "business environments that requires you to shake hands". – David Richerby 6 hours ago

This is a valid criticism of your answer.

In both cases, you can address the issue by editing the answer appropriately and then flagging the comments as obsolete. Arguing with a comment in another comment is not the way to go here.

Also, there is this:

This question and everything attached to it has generated 32 flags so far. That is way out of line for this site. We strive to take the smallest action that addresses a problem. The question and many of the answers are valuable and it's not fair to the other participants to let this kind of stuff get out of hand.

Addendum

I was asked in a comment:

@MonicaCellio I am really confused by your summary of blankip's addendum. It basically said "Unfortunately I would be remiss not to mention the fact that there is a negative stereotype in the US against Muslims which is blah. Be aware that doing blah may lead people to believe blah about you." S/he wasn't promoting or approving the stereotype, just presenting it as a sad fact of life. There are other parts of the answer that sound distinctly dodgier to me, so I'm not sure why you singled out that part. Can you be more specific about how you feel that the addedum violated site policy? – starsplusplus

It's the stuff that came next. This is what I removed in my first rollback:

Addendum: I think we need to talk about the elephant in the room. There is a massive perception that Muslim men feel that women are inferior. I don't want to get into this argument. You can say that this isn't true, but I can find countless others that will counter that - and if one of them has a problem with the author, he could be fired. So this begs the question - as a society that was brought together for equality where do we draw the line? I have had people comment that Muslims should be able to express their religion. Please please please tell me where the line will be drawn. Can a white person not shake a black person's hand because of religion? Is that OK? I personally think most of the comments on this question are useless unless the commenter can speak as to where that line gets drawn. Just because something is part of a religion doesn't make it right.

"I don't want to get into this argument" -- then why proceed to do so? That's not a "be nice" violation yet, just a signal.

"I personally think most of the comments..." -- not constructive; also not "not nice", just pointless. This is not a discussion forum.

The part in bold -- big problem. Judging the OP's religious motivations is problematic enough; playing the racism card is over the line. The "where do we draw the line?" theme is soap-boxing, not an answer. The only part of that paragraph that contributes to an answer to the question is advice about taking prejudice against one's religion into account when deciding what to do.

When the author reverted my edit I didn't happen to notice the minor variations he made in this paragraph, but they wouldn't have changed my analysis. I did notice the second added paragraph, and had the author given any signal at all that he wanted to work with us to address the problems in this answer instead of just arguing about it, I would have edited to keep some of that and to try to help/teach him. By then, though, the author had already complained here on meta about edits, so I didn't see any benefit in my putting in that extra work to improve his answer.

There have been complaints from the author that I edited this post because I don't like it. That is false. There are lots of posts on this site I don't like; I downvote them. (I downvoted this one.) People are allowed to be wrong on the Internet. But on this particular corner of the Internet, they are not allowed to be rude, to incite conflict, or to conduct irrelevant arguments, and I will edit for that (or delete if that's all it is). That we provide a textbox does not give anybody the right to fill it with stuff that doesn't belong, whether questions, answers, or comments.

The author has two choices as far as I'm concerned: (1) accept that this content is not permitted and we can unlock (feel free to edit further constructively), or (2) delete the answer.

Arguably this answer skirts the "not an answer" line in its current form, and if we unlock you might want to do something about that. Otherwise it's possible the community will.

Answer 3

In response to your question

Not only that but the mods keep deleting my comments in response to other comments BUT KEEP THE ORIGINAL COMMENTS.

Your answer has 62 deleted comments, 14 of which were added by you. The overwhelming majority of discussion on your answer was deleted by moderators (not myself, either).

Implying that the moderators are deleting your comments but leaving all the original comments is disingenuous at best, when of the 96% of the comments from others on your post were deleted.

I have an answer that had an entire paragraph chopped out of it

If you look through the revision history on your post, you will find that the part Monica removed initially is not what you have quoted here.

The removed paragraph effectively says, "your religion not wanting you to shake hands with women is basically the same as racism so you should get fired. And your religion is wrong."

Feel free to read Stack Exchange be nice policy, specifically:

• Name-calling. Focus on the post, not the person. That includes terms that feel personal even when they're applied to posts (like "lazy", "ignorant", or "whiny").

• Bigotry of any kind. Language likely to offend or alienate individuals or groups based on race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, etc. will not be tolerated. At all. (Those are just a few examples; when in doubt, just don't.)

Content like that paragraph is not appropriate on Stack Exchange.

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Addressing your concerns here

#1 Enderland's original answer comes directly from a comment that was deleted by the mods. I know that some people turn comments into answers. I know it happens everywhere. But I find it a gross misuse of power that I can delete something on a site and reuse it as mine.

I double checked all deleted comments posted before my answer on the question, your answer, and HGLEM's answer - no comment addressed the content of my answer (shake hands with neither gender) prior to me posting it.

As a result, I am unsure what you mean by this, can you please clarify?

The only even tangentially related comment posted when I posted was from you on your answer about 60 seconds before my answer was posted (it was you saying "I just know I treat everyone the same based on their sex/appearance/religion... those things. If my religion asked me to treat someone different I would just skip over that or I would put myself in situations where I didn't need to make these types of decisions").

I stand corrected, an inappropriate comment (which was deleted by a Stack Exchange Community Manager - not a moderator here - a little over 9 minutes before I posted my answer) did have language about that buried in it.

#2 Monica's thought in her answer to my question may be correct. However let's compare them to the comments that I made under Enderland's question a few hours ago about the validity of the link that was provided in their answer. Note that Monica kept comments under my question and deleted things that Enderland should be addressing. It would seem to me as being a simple peasant on the site that there is a hierarchy that is looking out for itself - different rules for different people.

You can find all these discussion points in this chat room which is linked on my answer.

Please take some time to read through what comments are. The sections "When should I comment?" and "When shouldn't I comment?" specifically.

Answer 4

I'm posting this separately to avoid mingling my explanation with the raw data.

Revision history of blankip's answer

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All comments on the question:

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All comments on HLGEM's answer:

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All comments on enderland's answer:

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All comments on user568458's answer:

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All comments on blankip's answer:

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All comments on Adel's answer:

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No comments on Zibbobz's answer have been deleted.

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No comments on Sjoerd's answer have been deleted.

Answer 5

In case of editing conflicts, the one originally posting the answer should have the final say. Their name is connected to the answer.

We don't want the kind of editing wars that made Wikipedia untrustworthy. In case of a conflict, both sides make their point, and the person whose name is connected to the answer has the final say.

Answer 6

Monica defends the use of the mods deleting comments. I am going to post this to the main Meta site but would like it discussed here.

#1 Enderland's original answer comes directly from a comment that was deleted by the mods. I know that some people turn comments into answers. I know it happens everywhere. But I find it a gross misuse of power that I can delete something on a site and reuse it as mine.

#2 Monica's thought in her answer to my question may be correct. However let's compare them to the comments that I made under Enderland's question a few hours ago about the validity of the link that was provided in their answer. Note that Monica kept comments under my question and deleted things that Enderland should be addressing. It would seem to me as being a simple peasant on the site that there is a hierarchy that is looking out for itself - different rules for different people.