Lane, Ryan wrote:
I personally don't understand the reasoning to want to edit other people's posts. Can you give an example of a good reason to edit someone's post? Truthfully, I think its more of a detriment than a benefit to be able to edit someone's posts. I can think of a ton of bad reasons to edit another persons post, but very very few good reasons.
It's the wiki way. Having the ability to edit what other people write gives rise to a culture of co-operation rather than confrontation.
We don't have a strong culture of refactoring, but it is traditional in a wiki to refactor discussions, which means, for someone to come through and take a large discussion and neutrally summarize what it was all about. Everything is in the edit history, and of course people can refactor the refactoring.
Basically, having a system open where people *can* do something bad, but don't, gives rise to a spirit of helpful togetherness. Building barriers out of fear of bad behavior gives rise to a spirit of mistrust.
It would be MUCH better to have a system where the user making the post allowed/disallowed people to edit their posts. If I'm signing my posts, I don't want someone to edit it to change my opinion to side with theirs. For instance, if this email were a part of a thread in a forum, you could change it to make it look like I side with your argument, and most people wouldn't notice.
We don't really have any problems with people doing stuff like that. It would be a massive social faux pas to edit someone's post to change your opinion. Just because it is *possible* doesn't mean that it's a *problem*.
It's like saying we need a law to prevent people from going into elevators together, because if we don't, people might stab each other. Well, yeah, they might, but we're better of in a positive social environment than a too-cautious social environment.
This is similar to a discussion we had about protecting user pages, and there was very universal agreement that with only rare exceptions (heroic vandal fighters like RickK for example, whose user page would be a constant mess, and even there of course I would encourage him to try to keep it unprotected if he can) user pages should be unprotected.
--Jimbo