Who are you to decide what is objectionable, or unnecessarily long, especially in someone's opinion based comment?
Strawman argument: I didn't say I "decide" anything. If anyone can edit, anyone can revert; the "decision" is ultimately that of the community, not of any individual. The purpose of the comment is (and will always be) to reflect a given user's opinion, and the community will ensure this will be met.
On the contrary, who are you to decide that nobody should be allowed to edit something, ESPECIALLY in a system where you are perfectly free to simply NOT SUBMIT whatever it is you don't want edited? We already have mailing lists where you can publish stuff that you don't want edited.
This is EXACTLY what a lot of people are talking about when they dislike the idea of someone editing their comments.
And the fact that it is a fallacy is EXACTLY what I'm talking about when I dislike the idea of giving in to it.
Just because something is status quo doesn't mean that it is working.
Nor does it mean that it is _not_ working. I see very little of the problems you have described, and even the problems that you have described are false dilemmas, i.e. they can perfectly well be addressed without preventing anyone from editing something. Example:
99% of the time, people who are reading the discussion section will NOT check the history to see if what someone said is really what someone said.
Right, so it needs to be made easier to check this, and/or there needs to be some sort of visual indication that there is a chance that it might not be what someone said. Both is addressed by my suggestion of adding a little "This comment was last edited by <username> <date/time>" with a link to a diff between the comment's original author's latest revision and the current revision. It surely does not mean it's necessary to make editing of any comment impossible.
I believe the proposed idea is quite a good balance between the current model, and a traditional forum/thread style model.
The proposed idea *is* a traditional forum/thread style model, with only two additional features (users can allow other users to edit their comments, and the concept of "channels"). It is to the wiki philosophy like Everything2 is to Wikipedia.
Ideologically, it's kind of like allowing people to submit articles and then keep them protected so only they can edit them. You're going to tell me that it's not the same thing because comments express a person's opinion, but this is why I added the word "ideologically". If it was just about letting people's paranoia free reign, then we could as well just use a box-standard web forum. In fact, it would already be possible _theoretically_ to move all discussions to a mailing list and use the Talk namespace only for the summaries/refactorings. Why don't we do this? Because IT'S NOT WIKI.
I think your objection to a new system is conservatism at its best.
It would be conservatism if I was an avid Talk-page participant. However you will notice that I am actually quite a bit more active on the mailing lists than the Talk pages.
The new model could offer quite a bit of benefit.
You have not convinced me of such a "benefit" of making it completely impossible to edit some comments. You have shown some drawbacks of the current system, but as I said, concluding from it that editing needs to be made impossible is a false-dilemma fallacy.
Timwi