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I recently suggested this edit to revert vandalism committed by a user against their question. One reviewer accepted the edit, but then I see that it has been rejected (shows as a "rejected edit" in my profile) without any further review.

What happened? What was bad about my edit? What exactly did I do wrong and what should I do differently next time to avoid having my edit rejected?

2 Answers 2

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What happened? What was bad about my edit? What exactly did I do wrong and what should I do differently next time to avoid having my edit rejected?

You did nothing wrong. Looking a bit at the events you mentioned, it seems that the thing here was a thing of timing.

The order of events happened like this:

  1. You suggested the edit.
  2. One person reviews it and Accepts it (missing one accept).
  3. OP Rolled back to the non-vandalized version, discarding your edit suggestion.

So, you did nothing wrong, but was the rollback happened before you edit being accepted completely it was discarded it seems.

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The word "vandalism" implies an intention to deface or break something.

"Vandalism" really is NOT the right word to describe what the OP did with their question. OP asked a question, had second-thoughts about it and deleted (or tried to delete) their own question in a short interval of time. If, instead, the OP had been systematically clearing-out their entire inventory of questions and answers because of, say, a disagreement about licensing trivialities, THAT should be considered vandalism.

But I think there are instances (like this one) where someone has legitimately reconsidered their question and just don't want it posted here. There are some very good reasons for doing that given the harsh judgemental nature of the stackexchange comments and questions. Workplace issues can be deeply personal and not everyone wants to expose their innermost thoughts in what can be a hostile place.

What probably happened is that someone in the review queue didn't feel OK about you reinstating the OP's self-deleted question, so you got rejected (I too would have rejected such an edit). Someone else tried and, randomly, got their edits approved AFAICT.

Maybe a better solution here is to give a bit more control to the OP. If they post a question and a few hours later decide they don't want it, why not just give the OP the benefit of the doubt and delete the question? Or at least raise the threshold for what is required to keep from deleting the question. I realize that there are automatic "rules" about what conditions allow an OP to delete their own question, I am saying these should be relaxed some more in favor of the OP's intentions.

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  • Whether you like it or not, OP deleting the question text because they no longer want it online IS vandalism on Stack Exchange, network-wide, including here. Once someone posts, no matter what, that post now belongs to the community, and the OP is a major voice in what happens next, but they are certainly not the only voice nor the absolute determinant of what can be done with it.
    – user119489
    Jul 8, 2020 at 3:51
  • You can pretend that it's "vandalism" if you want, I know SE attracts sticklers for "rules", and if the "rules" define it as such, then many of you uncritically accept that. But even you admit there's some extra latitude given to the author. The author can delete a question under certain conditions and can always edit it. I am just saying it would be better to give a bit more slack to the OP for deletion-- especially in the case of very short elapsed time from post to deletion and very little activity for the question.
    – teego1967
    Jul 8, 2020 at 15:16

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