Improving other's questions via adding solution attempts in the question [duplicate]

Question

This is a bit of a puzzler for me and I'd like to try to work out what our community norms and guidelines are around this topic.

Suppose user A posts a question which is a bit light on context. User B sees this and decides that they want to improve the question so that it might avoid closure/deletion (or in the case it's closed, to push for reopening). The way in which user B does this is by adding a partial attempt to the original question, pursuant to the first suggestion of "including your work" in the guide on how to ask a good question.

When and under what conditions is this appropriate behavior?

On the one hand I understand and appreciate the motivation to improve a question that you like but which is perhaps not quite up to our community standards. On the other, including a solution attempt by someone who's not the OP strikes me as potentially a little dishonest, and contrary to the principle that "[e]ven edits that must make drastic changes should strive to preserve the goals of the post's owner" (this is from the suggested edit review dialog). There's also a potential issue with such an edit occurring after an answer has been submitted: if the added attempt is just the first step of the submitted solution, this feels unsatisfying to me.

Relevant Examples

Question 2524460: Looking at the edit history, it would seem that this is a fairly large edit which adds a nearly-complete solution to the post and changes the intent of the post from "where can I start on this" to "how do I do this without this particular argument". I'm not really a fan of this.

Question 124663: In this question, I found David Speyer's edit explaining why this question was difficult (essentially "the approach you'd want to take doesn't work because of the following problem") to be a valuable addition to the post, even if it's at least passingly similar to the sort of edit above that ruffles my feathers.

Goal

I'd like to explicate our community norms/policies about what sort of edits to add context are appropriate. Answers should address general principles for what sort of context is acceptable to add as an editor to questions by others, how this changes based on the general situation surrounding the question (whether the question is already answered, one's previous interactions with the question, etc) and ideally include discussion of examples (either those I've provided in this post or other posts from MSE) to see the potential effects of proposed guidelines.

Answer 1

(What follows is my personal opinion. The mod team has not discussed this internally at length.)

You say that "[you]'d like to explicate our community norms/policies about what sort of edits to add context are appropriate". So I'll attempt to give my POV regarding that.

Edits to add context, in the general sense of context, can be very frequently appropriate and useful, particularly in old and/or interesting conceptual questions.

Let me give a theoretical example. Suppose someone makes a question which reads as:

Title: "Example of manifold"

Text: "Show an example of a manifold for which $\pi_1(M)=\mathbb{Q}$."

Let's put aside whether such a question should be closed or left open as is. What is important for the matter at hand is: Suppose that, instead of that, we had something like:

Title: "Is there an example of a manifold for which $\pi_1(M) =\mathbb{Q}$?"

Text: "Common intuitive explanations for the fundamental group usually involve some kind of counting of number of turns. It is known that manifolds must have at most countable fundamental groups, but given what was mentioned, it is unclear whether it would be possible for a manifold to have $\pi_1(M) =\mathbb{Q}$. Does there exist such an example? "

In my opinion, this improves the question. A potential problem is that this may be considered intrusive if the question is not old. A good practice could be to make the edit and signalize something to the OP, like: "Hello! I provided some background and context to your question. If you think something does not line up with your train of thought regarding how you came up with the question, feel free to change it to something more attuned with what you had in mind."

Edits to add attempts are considerably more problematic. Adding attempts for others misses the point of most aspects of what attempts by the OP are supposed to signify/signalize. To give some examples, it does not help to understand what tools are available to the OP, or what were the difficulties they may have found, or what kind of investment in the question exists etc. Of course, if the attempt was described in comments, then transcribing it is another thing altogether, but this is not what is being discussed. In fact, I don't see how including a solution attempt by someone who's not the OP is useful. And this is not even mentioning the problematic aspect of conflict of interest.

Answer 2

I guess I need to chime in because I have resorted to this tactic myself on occasion. My battle cry has been Whoever wants to preserve a question of doubtful quality should take charge and edit it into shape.

So I plead guilty to the charge of promoting this practice as one of the alternative ways of salvaging a broken question.

Observation:

It makes for good context, when the asker works out a simple case of a general claim/question they cannot fully settle. When others do that on their behalf, it feels a bit unnatural, and is difficult to do well.

Sorry to rehash my related (mis)adventures. Listing them here mostly because they give us more examples to look at.

• The first time I did this (bearing a still shiny new diamond) was discussed here. I radically edited a controversial question from this to this, enhancing its focus by deleting all but one of the questions (uncontroversial), but also added a solution to one instance (more controversial). Also, one of my objectives was to send a message to the anti-deletionist faction Do this, and you can save your precious answers. That didn't go down smooth like a mountain stream, but now I'm veering off-topic.
• Here is another misadventure on this theme. I did this half-baked edit to salvage a question I found interesting, but was certainly lacking in context. I abused my diamond power to reopen a question, and only edited it after I was chastised for that. Bad aftertaste. Deservedly.
• But, this practice can work out. I would say that my edit here was a success. The question got duly reopened. I put a bounty on it (was my plan when editing), and we now have better content on the site.

Is there anything to learn from these examples? May be the following:

Adding an attempted/partial solution on another user's behalf looks ok, when the person doing the editing has spent some time on the question themself, but is still somewhat in the dark. This is because then it is a genuine attempt. When the editor has solved the problem (or absorbed a solution provided by someone else), such an edit feels unnatural and artificial.

Answer 3

The action of closing is meant to be a signal of improvement of a post. Unfortunately, there are users who take it as a sort of "punishment" and make great efforts of rolling back any improvement that is not directly from the OP because the improvement makes the post exempt from being closed and deleted.

As long as the essence of the question in the post is not changed, community improvement of the post should not be rolled back.

Adding attempts to existent posts?

Once a question is posted and particularly when it is answered, the question-and-answer exchange become part of the repository of the site. There are users, notably members in the CURED chat room, who want to delete such completed exchange whenever "attempts" from OP is absent --- without "Deletion", it cannot be CURED.

Adding "solution attempts" to such exchange is an inconvenient attempt to salvage the exchange. It is nevertheless understandable: if such attempts add nothing to the repository, why the mumble-jumble from OP, which only serves as a temporary proof of "I have tried it" that is mostly useless noise for the future readers who are constantly encouraged to search the site more often, is a must in the first place?

Instead of "these posts must go to hell", we may suggest a "prescription" to "cure" if one wants to salvage a post from the execution list. One possible way is adding "context", which is by no means limited, let alone equivalent, to "solution attempts".