How best to review this question ? A correct edit on an answer

Question

Looking at this answer it is substantially correct i.e the answer clearly says "perfect", which a beginner may not understand, and the edit adds in details on speed of propagation which enhances the answer and is a correct edit.

When I first saw the edit I almost rejected it as being such a major addition. But I realized that the edit did help, so I accepted it.

However, this raises the question, how best to edit/change/add material to a correct answer but with more nuance?

My gut feeling is that a second answer which refers to the first answer would have been preferable as a refinement.

What say ye?

Answer 1

I've seen a few of those cases myself and I can tell I've been tempted to accept edits like these. It seems such a waste of good information. But I believe that these edits do change considerably the post and thus I would tend to rejected them.

In this particular answer you pointed out, the fact that the author mentioned what would happen in a perfect scenario isn't enough to warrant that he or she wanted to dive into the details of the real PCB scenario (or even that he or she knows it).

I agree with you that the author of this edit should have posted a separate answer refining the other one, so that would have been the comment I'd post with the edit rejection.

But this clearly isn't a major issue. I can see that you reviewed the edit carefully and put a lot of though on it. To me your action was valid and I wouldn't question it at all. Especially because the site notifies the author about those edits and he or she may roll the edit back if he or she wanted. In this case, he just got his answer improved for free. We all won. I'd say it was a good call.

Answer 2

I was the only one to reject this edit, so I feel compelled to give my point of view here. I believe this should have been a comment.

As long as an answer isn't a community wiki, I don't think it's really the idea of an edit to add things - only to clarify and improve what has been written already. Adding a new paragraph seemed too much to me, so I rejected the edit.

But it's a difficult one.

Answer 3

I think that the edit was a bit out of place, not because of its length but because it somehow contradicts the original answer. A reader would struggle to see the difference in author, and end up confused about what the answer is actually saying. Therefore, I believe a separate answer, or a comment to the answer suggesting the change would have been better.

But generally, I think that edits that expand (even largely) on the current answer while maintaining consistent with it, are only beneficial as they come to the benefit of the reader. Technically, fewer complete answers are better than more incomplete ones.

And besides that, I think that an edit to someone else's answer, if done in good faith, is even more "genuine" since the editor should know that he won't gain any rep from what he writes.