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First of all, I am not reaching out to the person who did this to disadvantage him.

Basically what happend is, the OP asked a question. I suggested some little edits to improve the formatting. Instead of accepting the edit I suggested, did the OP edit the question himself.

In addition to this event, is it allowed/acceptable for the OP to edit the question himself instead of accepting the suggested edit?

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2 Answers 2

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For some context here is what we see when reviewing suggested edits, as you may not be able to see the suggested edit queue yet:

enter image description here

There are options to "improve edit" and "reject and edit". This is also what the owner of the post will see when it has a pending suggested edit such as yours.

It looks a bit like the suggested edit was rejected as a "reject and edit". While some of your edits were incorporated there were more substantive changes that occurred. They could have simply improved your edit but they may not have felt your edit "did enough".

If they simply rejected your edit and then made the exact same edit then I would say that it was most definitely bad form.

There is some discussion across the network:

It is a difficult call between rejection and improving for reviewers but ultimately the owner of the question has the power of veto. If they dislike or otherwise do not want an edit then it is their prerogative to reject it.

Morally they possibly maybe should have accepted your edit, but are they allowed to reject and edit their question themselves? Yes, they are.

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Here's the review item. The post is deleted now, so I'll show the results pane here:

The edit was automatically rejected with no direct reviewer interaction. If it had been explicitly reviewed from the queue, there would be a "Reject and Edit" line like on this task or a human attached to the Reject line.

When there's a pending suggested edit on a post, the "edit" link becomes "edit (1)" and produces the review item instead of the editor window, so it's unlikely that the post author intentionally created a conflicting edit (I'm pretty sure it's possible, albeit inconvenient, to clobber a pending suggested edit outside the review queue). Here's part of the question's timeline:

enter image description here

The suggested edit was submitted at 8:24:49Z. The edit submitted by the question author that invalidated the suggested edit was done at 8:26:56Z, only two minutes later. Therefore, I suspect this is what happened:

  1. The question author clicked "edit" to start working on some changes
  2. You clicked "edit" to start working on a suggested edit
  3. You finished your revisions and submitted the suggested edit
  4. The question author submitted their edit, clobbering your pending suggestion

The question author may not have ever been aware of your edit.

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    This is the most likely chain of events and should probably be the "correct" answer. My answer is simply addressing whether or not the behaviour would be "acceptable" if it were done intentionally which, as you say, it probably wasn't.
    – Mokubai Mod
    Mar 16, 2018 at 16:05
  • This could, theoretically, be the case.  But the edit by basin (the OP of the question) is an exact superset of the suggested edit by Thimo Demey (the author of this meta question); no part of the suggested edit was rejected or even tweaked.  What is the probability that basin came up with exactly all the same changes Thimo suggested without looking at the suggested edit?  IMHO, infinitesimal. Mar 16, 2018 at 20:53
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    @Scott, a slightly revised scenario: they were both working on it simultaneously. At Save time, the OP became aware of the suggested edit, perhaps because the original was open on another page or they got the automated warning of the conflicting edits. The OP then incorporated the other edits into their own.
    – fixer1234
    Mar 16, 2018 at 21:12
  • @fixer1234: All right, maybe the OP didn’t click on “Reject and Edit”.   Even in your scenario, they (knowingly) copied Thimo’s suggested changes into their edit. Mar 16, 2018 at 21:18
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    @Scott, true, but after investing time in the edit, that would have been the practical solution. Few people are likely to kill the edit they just worked on, accept the proposed one, and then redo their own edit. Simultaneous edits don't happen all that often, so stuff like this occasionally happens.
    – fixer1234
    Mar 16, 2018 at 21:34

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