A while back I asked a question and recieved a good answer from a well known site member. It's a solid answer and I have no intention of unselecting it. Recently another answer was provided. This second answer provides some excellent details and my plan was to award a bounty to it.
The issue is that, when checking the edit history, I find that this answer was, originally, just a short sentence and an image. It provides information, but then the question was edited. If you check the edit history, you'll see the first version was simple and relied, essentially, on an image file. In the second version, the editor added more images and more text to significantly upgrade the answer.
After becoming aware of the edit history, as the asker of the question, I think the significant work for this answer comes more from the editor of the answer than the initial answer. In other words, the site member who posted the answer did not provide as much information as the editor did.
In terms of work done and reward offered, most of the work was done by the editor and it seems more appropriate the bounty go to him rather than the original poster of the question. I don't see a way, within the SE framework, to provide a bounty to an editor of an answer (or question).
I've considered a couple options:
- Find another answer by the editor and set up a bounty on that question and award it to him, but that doesn't indicate, on the answer I like, that it's good enough to receive a bounty.
- Suggest the editor use his extra material in a new answer, rollback the edits done on the answer, then award the bounty to this entirely new answer containing all of the editor's original material.
I'm open to suggestions or other ways this could be handled. I basically want the bounty to show on this person's work to make it clear where the notable information came from that provided good background that adds to the original selected answer.
This is significantly different from this question, since that question addresses only the idea of hunting down other answers and giving them bounties. While I mention this as a possible solution in my first option, I am providing at least one other option and asking if there are other possibilities. The focus of the other question is entirely on providing a bounty for a user's answer on another question. I'm asking about other ways to do it, which presents a potential for many more solutions.
