Adding quotes to others' answers - when is it acceptable?

Question

I feel bad bringing this up because I think TheLethalCarrot has been doing a good job at fixing up a lot of old questions and answers with relevant quotes, but in Fantasy book where the "wizards" constructs their towers in their minds, two people have objected to the changes made to their answers (one reverting the changes because they gained a downvote from it). I feel obliged to raise this with the community and see if anyone draws issue with it.

I know I, for one, often fix "title-only" or even "link-only" answers by adding a quote from that link, but substantive changes are often challenged and I know I've personally been burned by adding additional text the original author didn't want.

Answer 1

General Case

Edits are generally used for fixing typos, adding in info from a link, fixing formatting etc. New information is sometimes added but it is generally not too much new information, maybe an extra quote or something to back up the answer. Adding a source for the OPs claims is also fine. Anything more than that and the editor has a few options.

• Edit it in anyway - after all it's SEs goal to build knowledge and adding info is always better than not (if it is relevant).

• Comment on the answer - let the answerer decide if they want the detail in their answer or not.

• Post a new answer - whether community wiki or not (you decide, depends on how much work you put into it etc etc) adding the information somewhere in the relevant place should always be encouraged rather than not adding it.

• Leave the information out - I'd always encourage to add information if it is relevant but maybe it's tangential or only confirms the OPs answer in another source so isn't entirely needed. I'd still suggest to leave it somewhere on the post but it may not be necessary.

Story Id Case

Story Id's are a bit different to the general case in that a lot of the hard work is actually done in getting the right answer. Here I'd be more liberal with adding in information yourself.

• If you have access to the source material edit in relevant quotes that match the OPs points.

• Link/title only - add a blurb or summary from somewhere.

• You feel the answer ignore some of the OPs points but can see how they match the work, add in the detail.

• OP describes a cover but there isn't one in the answer and you know of a matching one, edit one in.

Specific Cases

Case #1

Here I reworked the sentence to read as it was meant to (though looks like I forgot to fix it completely i.e. "one the the" should have been "one of the" but I must have missed it). I then edited in a link to the series as it provides more information for the OP to see if this is the correct story: covers, reviews, brief description etc.

Lastly, I edited in the summary from the link, it isn't the best summary in the world but it does give us some useful information not already included in the answer.

• It's part of a series.

• The place the world is set.

• The story is about three characters.

• The over arching theme between the books i.e. love.

It doesn't give any specific details but a general overview along with the place name might be enough to jog the OP's memory.

Case #2

I edited in some information from the link, the direct quote, in case it goes down. This appeared to be what the OP was basing their description of the character off of at the time and it's always better to have that information in the answer itself.

The OP disagreed with my edit and rolled it back, that's fine it is their answer to do with as they please. However, they then added in a quote from the book with a similar description of the character so my edit must have been along the correct lines in the first place.

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Lastly, to provide a bit of context to why these posts were edited in the first place. I am currently going through old posts and fixing tags where they should be fixed. At the same time as doing that I am trying to fix everything I see that could be done on the whole post, to avoid the post being bumped a few times down the line.

To put people at ease I am trying to do around only 5 or 6 posts a day, depending on traffic levels on the homepage, and spread them around the day. Some days I'll do more, some less. Don't worry though I won't be destroying the homepage with old posts.

If anyone does have a query about a specific edit I would gladly discuss it with them. I should always be pingable in TREU and commenting on the answer is another way you can reach me.

Answer 2

It would be nice if we could have a definitive answer to this (though I suspect no definitive answer exists). I've tried both strategies and both have their drawbacks. I have added new answers with the details, but a couple of times the OP has accepted my answer instead of the first answer and that feels a bit unfair on the person who first identified the book.

These days I tend to edit the original post but keep my edits as streamlined as possible e.g. add just a single quote. I take the points Kevin makes in his answer, but I don't think it's substantially changing the substance of a post if you add the minimum information required to show that the identification of the book is correct.

Answer 3

There are two separate issues here:

1. Block quotes are for quotes, i.e. material copied from somewhere else. Such copying normally requires attribution or citation in some form. Marking the material as a quote is necessary but insufficient. You must also provide some indication of where the material came from. On the other hand, if it's not a quote, then don't use block quotes (except for spoiler markup, that's a special case).
2. Edits are meant to be used for correcting grammatical mistakes, improving formatting, clarifying wording, adding paragraph breaks, and other such minor changes. Edits should not normally change the substance of a question or answer, unless it's a community wiki. If you want to add a lot of new information, write a new answer, possibly referring to the other answer as inspiration. There may be some leeway for improving very poor answers that would otherwise be deleted, but this is a tricky business because you still need to avoid changing the answer's intent. Tread lightly.

And a minor pet peeve of mine that probably isn't worth arguing over:

3. Just about every style guide that I have ever read recommends putting some work titles in quotation marks and others in italics, but I have never seen a recommendation to put the same work title in both quotes and italics at the same time. Don't do that, especially when you are editing someone else's answer (they may be following a different style than you, and it's rather pointless to edit war over style).