If this is the case here as well (as I strongly suspect), why my edit was rejected? Or am I missing something?
Unclear. Both meta comments should be partially removed, though you should be careful about removing information that gives context. The second comment definitely should go. In the first, you could think about not removing the fact the question comes from an assignment.
The edit should not have been rejected, but rather improved. Approving the edit would not have done too much harm, either, since the question is quite old and inactive.
Another user rightly pointed to these guidelines on making or suggesting good edits. The following issues do pop up regarding the edit:
- Consider the age of the post: in this case, it was 8 years old.
- Don't just remove noise.
Later, there was some discussion in the comments regarding leaving the fact the question comes from an assignment (emphasis mine).
...nothing unexpected, except that "Indicate your own background [so that we can know the audience]", which sounds to me really weird, and seemingly contrary to what I think I have understood as a general SE rule answering questions for ~7 years in at least 4 different SE sites (namely that a question must have a value on its own, regardless from the specifics of the OPs).
The site receives many questions from wildly different backgrounds every day: students in high school, undergraduates, MSc , PhDs, and sometimes working mathematicians in early or even senior positions (although this latter two situations happen much more often in MathOverflow). This may be clear from the kind of question asked, but not always.
Moreover, there are non-trivial overlappings when it comes to these levels, in the sense that one may be studying say manifolds but still be unfamiliar with vector bundles, or de Rham cohomology, or Chern classes, etc, and now only basic definitions. Many questions admit simple answers understandable by beginners, or quick but complicated answers that require maybe some further training.
Thus, knowing the background of the OP is usually quite essential when producing an answer, and it is common for users to ask the OP what their background is, and what possible tools they have available. At the same time, producing answers that solve the question for the OP, using reasonable toolsets, is allowed and even encouraged, as it can help people different from the OP.
In any case, the post here was for a very specific question, and I have yet to see an argument why the mere presence of the term "assignment" provides any real context.
Questions come from people that are doing mathematics as a hobby, self-learning from a book, learning from a course, writing a more-or-less complex assignment for an upper level course, etc. In particular, questions coming from an assignment tend to be solved by certain fixed toolsets given by lecturers (unfortunately, this is not great, but that is another discussion). Depending on the subject, the toolsets may be narrower or wider, and it is useful to know at what level the OP is learning it.
Saying that the problem comes from an assignment only, however, is not really good enough, but is good for more experienced users to ask for further detail: what course, what book is being used, at what level is the course being taught. Similarly, if one mentions certain issue but omits it comes from a book or from lectures notes, or has an issue with results but omits the original paper, this will usually be frowned upon.
Many users in the site are experienced lecturers and/or researchers at various institutions, that have written books and notes themselves at the undergraduate and graduate level, and thus are able to appreciate the subtleties that appear when providing answers to such questions. In fact, a large portion of users tend to avoid answering posts that lack such context, and we have included it in our guidelines.
