Editing questions: dos and don'ts

Question

What is the etiquette for editing questions? How much is it OK to modify? What are the guidelines and what are the limits?

I am concerned that once a question has been edited, the difficulties facing the initial user may not be as conspicuous because the editor may have inadvertently filled in some critical conceptual gaps in the question.

Specifically:

1. Datasets are sometimes presented in different ways including jpeg screenshots. How should they be reformatted, in particular to avoid presuming R familiarity or preference? On this issue I got moderator guidance from @whuber advising to format them as text (usually comma delimited), or else include the data in the answer.

2. Should plots be always left untouched? Beyond subjective, aesthetic considerations, perhaps some subtle change in the presentation or the data may occur that defeats the purpose of the OP.

3. Do you all agree that improving the grammar to make the question understandable is an OK reason for an edit?

4. Is reformatting with $\LaTeX{}$ to beautify equations OK without exceptions?

Answer 1

This is a series of side-notes to @Glen_b's excellent answer.

Editing is a public service. Even some small edits can just clean up a post and make it easier for everyone to read, which is a positive contribution. Often an edit can change a question that looks too messy to wade through to one that looks readable. Editing can and should help the OP, who should get more and quicker attention (and, although this is a side-effect, who should also get feedback on their presentation for future questions). It helps others too.

Editing does not impart a moral judgment. We can't confidently and consistently distinguish between over-hasty, lazy presentation and someone struggling with one, two or even all three of a second language; statistics they really don't understand; and a medium that is unfamiliar. That said, I will on occasion comment firmly that a question (or answer) is just too messy to be worth anyone's time to edit. If the OP isn't able or willing to fix the presentation, then that is the end of the story: we are all volunteers here and there is no obligation to be infinitely helpful.

Changing just one small thing requires a careful decision. It will bump the question momentarily to the top of the active list. Some people are irritated to re-open a post of interest to find one minute change. But even threads that have seen many posts can carry errors worth correcting. Nevertheless, for this and other reasons, it is good advice that if you edit, edit everything that you spot as deserving change, so as to make the edit worthwhile.

Editing just the title can be valuable too. Posters can be especially blind to typos in the title. Considering that titles are key for later searches, even trivial misspellings can be a nuisance. It's common that titles are too long and/or carry useless words (please help; question about; how to analyse my data). On the other hand, sometimes you need to flag to posters that they should think up a better title themselves. (It's a fact of life in a forum that some members use eccentric or inadequately informative titles as a criterion for what to ignore, so improving them may seem a disservice too.)

Edits can be of any aspect of presentation (text, mathematics, code or data presentation), but as far as possible should only clarify, not change, the statistical content that defines the question being asked.

So you can edit grammar, spelling, punctuation and style, but you should not change strange or even incorrect uses of statistical terms, or any other dubious statistical content, even if obvious to you. Naturally, you should only change the language if you are confident that you are right (or have better taste or style...)! (Don't worry too much about this; a mistaken edit can be reversed.)

Content that should be removed includes greetings (at the beginning of a post) or signatures (at the end) and any material that looks irrelevant to the question. That includes polite (or even not so polite) expressions of how confused the poster is, how much time they have already spent working on the problem, how grateful they will be for an answer and (especially) how urgent or important the question is. The aim is not to deny the human side underlying a question, but to focus exclusively on the technical content at its heart. In a busy world, being able to read that content quickly and easily is a bonus for all. (Whether it's a benefit that editing sometimes makes it clearer that there is no underlying precise and concise question I leave as an open question.)

There is, as often, a small tension between the immediate, short-term aim of helping the original poster and the ultimate, longer-term aim of building an archive of high quality answered questions that should be of interest or use to many readers (in many cases, long after a poster may have disappeared from the forum). But any errors, omissions, or confusion in the statistical content of a question are likely to be part of the OP's problem and should be left as posted. Someone who edits a question need have no intention of answering it, but it can be helpful to publicise difficult points through comments. For example, you say that you want to apply multivariate regression, but you only have one response variable, so I think you mean multiple regression.

Similarly, you can introduce or improve mark-up of mathematics, code and data, but should not change even poor notation choices, which could be part of the problem. I would correct trivia, as when someone has posted $\beta2$, but it's evident that they mean $\beta_2$, but if in doubt, do not edit, but rather comment. There seems to be a square missing from your variance formula.

I think that it is rare that you should replace someone's graph. But here is a further situation where that does seems right: when presented with a very crude hand-drawn graph that someone has scanned or photographed, you may without loss be able to do a much better job.

Answer 2

[Just to make clear, though my answers should always be read this way: this is personal opinion]

You don't need to have any intention of answering a question to edit it.

the difficulties facing the initial user may not be as conspicuous because the editor may have inadvertently filled in some critical conceptual gaps in the OP.

Where feasible, it's important to have a question and answer that will be understood by and be useful to more people.

Mostly you should lean toward letting the OP's phrasing stand, but you can certainly encourage the OP to clarify. While some people would lean toward never fixing misconceptions in the question, if it's a side issue to the main question and fixing it is likely to clarify that misconception for the OP it may be okay. (It can sometimes be hard to be sure, though.)

The concern you mentioned is certainly possible so if you do edit, care must be taken - and you can always invite the OP to change anything back.

In the case of plots, and beyond subjective, aesthetic considerations, perhaps some subtle change in the presentation or the data may occur that defeats the purpose of the OP.

Such things are always a small risk with edits. If you're aware of the possibility, it's unlikely to be a major problem. Note that edits can be rolled back.

How should data points be posted to avoid presuming R familiarity or preference?

Certainly avoid editing to make anything R-specific; if it's already R-specific that's different. It's perfectly possible to edit to produce a cleanly-formatted ASCII table, for example, which will copy-paste (or easily be read) into a wide variety of packages.

e.g. something formatted like this:

    A     B
    4     2
    4    10
    7     4
    7    22
    8    16
    9    10

... is not R-specific but will read straight into R with a copy-paste (type OPdata=read.table(stdin(),header=TRUE) then paste, press Enter and you have a data frame; or just read from clipboard rather than stdin)

So: plain ASCII text in a standard form (space delimited or comma-delimited, compatible with CSV) is desirable -- these can be read by almost anything. This is uniformly better that an image of numbers (since it contains the same information but can be used by answerers) ... but be very careful you don't change the data!

On this issue I got moderator guidance from @whuber advising to format them as text (usually comma delimited), or else include the data in the answer.

It's sensible advice; I'd add space-delimited to the mix of what's fine.

Should plots be always left untouched?

I don't have enough context to know what things you're proposing to fix, but usually you wouldn't alter a plot. Always is too strong.

There are some situations where I have edited a plot. One example is where there's a small plot with gigantic amounts of white-space around it (a plot smaller than 1/10 the size of a standard page (A4 or 8.5x11), say 3x2.5 inches sitting in a field of white pixels the size of a page. In that case I cut out almost all the white space.

Do you all agree that improving the grammar to make the question understandable is an OK reason for an edit in some cases?

Yes, almost always.

Is reformatting with latex to beautify equations OK without exceptions?

Nearly always, it's a good thing to do.

But without exception? That's hard to say, since exceptions may be things we haven't thought of. But in this case I can think of a few possible exceptions.

i. If I expect a post will move to SO I try to avoid LaTeX.

ii. If an equation can as easily be read as pseudocode (e.g. can very easily be turned into say a formula in R if left as is) I'm less inclined to edit it because there's another way to use it as it stands.

Your question is filled with requests for absolutes. That's not going to happen. Don't look for ironclad rules here. Just act sensibly, change things in ways that will clearly improve the post for as many people as you can, but with respect for the OP's intent.

If one is to edit (which is a very good thing to do), it's necessary to accept that:

1. You will occasionally make mistakes (of judgement, say)

2. Even when you act in very sensible ways, people will disagree occasionally; there can be legitimate difference of opinion

Don't get too bothered about these things unless there seem to be a lot of problems, in which case you may need to attempt to move your expectations toward the community norms more. Mistakes are not irretrievable -- as the saying goes, it's not rocket surgery.

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Oh, and definitely put me down in the "the data were" column. "Datum" is singular, "data" is a plural noun.