Now normally I would say that the person editing is in the wrong here and he should have made his own answer, but in this specific case the errors of the original answerer were minimal but crucial: Laravel:Unknown column 'updated_at' .

The accepted answer has an edit history where it didn't work for me in his original answer. Then someone commented with: it should be: $timestamps instead of $timestamp and the commenter himself edited it to that. After that, another user commented it should be public instead of protected and he himself edited it as well. Now this answer got 114 upvotes, with all the reputation going to the person who made the first wrong answer. After the person answered with the wrong answer, he/she never looked/responded/edited the answer himself.

This person just got a lot of reputation for providing a wrong answer. This case the OP was close to the wrong answer but still overall I feel like this is wrong.

Is it fair that the original answerer gets the reputation with the wrong answer? And what should be the case in the people providing the right edits? Should they actually create their own answer while its 90% similar to the other answer?

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    No one has edited the question. Did you mean that a third party edited the answer? – Ben Voigt Jul 7 '17 at 14:25
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    Why did you approve the answer in the first place if it didn't help you at the time? Also those votes were most likely due to helping many others also. Seems petty to bring this all up several years later – charlietfl Jul 8 '17 at 23:07
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    @charlietfl It's not as if I'm doing this to actually remove the specific answerer his reputation. Im just asking what should be the case in this situation, may it rise again. – Loko Jul 10 '17 at 7:30
  • How about the other situation, which happens more often. Answer is posted, being incorrect; someone posts a comment pointing this out; the answerer himself edits the answer. Are you saying that upvotes after that point are more fair than if the commenter had edited the post? – Mr Lister Jul 10 '17 at 9:46
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    Always remember that you are upvoting posts (questions or answers), not people. – poke Jul 10 '17 at 9:57
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    @MrLister In that situation I think most of the time the person that posts, sees his error and decides to edit the answer(He doesn't just edit without checking documentation or examples I think). When the edit happens from another person that makes it a right answer, the poster never actually provided anything to the working answer. My opinion might be wrong but thats how I would see it. – Loko Jul 10 '17 at 10:03
  • @poke Yeah I guess I should see it that way. – Loko Jul 10 '17 at 10:04
  • by this logic you should be moaning at the people who approved the edits as the edits were done by <2k which would need 3 approvals from >2k – WhatsThePoint Jul 10 '17 at 11:00
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    @WhatsThePoint Please dont get me wrong. I dont mean to moan. I just want to know is this is intended behaviour. – Loko Jul 10 '17 at 11:24

You really shouldn't look at upvotes primarily for "giving someone reputation".

There is a very simple and universal question you should ask yourself before upvoting an answer:

Is this useful and a positive contribution to Q&A? Does it solve the problem as posed right now, and does it do it well?

If you answer "yes" to that, then go ahead and upvote. 10 reputation is a chime in the wind; in the end, it doesn't matter that much. The purpose of upvotes isn't primarily to be a reputation delivery system; that's only the underlying incentive behind it.

The real purpose for upvotes is to signal what is useful. And if the answer is useful after the edit, sure, go ahead and upvote it. Or don't. Nobody is forcing you either way.

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    Yeah but still, reputation gives privileges. With 114 upvotes on an answer that YOU didnt create, you just get privileges for giving a wrong answer. Lets say thats his only answer(so 1 answer and it's a wrong answer), he'd get 1000+ reputation for a wrong answer. Which means he can now: Create chat rooms, almost create tags, view close votes, documentation review etc... – Loko Jul 7 '17 at 12:12
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    @Loko The allocation of privileges is an imprecise process anyhow. And most people that get reputation in this manner don't do it to get privileges. Because these privileges are mostly duties. You won't see upvote mongers start reviewing close votes and stuff. – Magisch Jul 7 '17 at 12:15
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    @Loko I suspect most of the up-votes came after the typo was corrected, and when it was therefore the (fully) correct answer. In that case, the answer deserved all of the votes it got. – FKEinternet Jul 8 '17 at 18:51
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    @Loko What if someone got 1000+ reputation for a single correct answer and never contributed anything else to the site, would that user then somehow be more qualified to get those privileges? – knbk Jul 9 '17 at 11:15
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    @Loko generally concerns like you raised are assumed to be addressed by community-wiki feature, which both opens the post for substantial edits and detaches author rep from votes. However as pointed in another answer here your particular case is not quite clear cut for CW, at least not yet – gnat Jul 9 '17 at 11:21
  • 'privileges' is Newspeak for 'burdens'. – RyanfaeScotland Jul 9 '17 at 22:55
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    @knbk Good point, you're right. It makes it worse in my opinion when it's a wrong answer. Still, you're right. – Loko Jul 10 '17 at 7:38
  • With enough reputation and good SO behavior you turn into a moderator and no longer have time to give answers to questions, much less time to do the dishes, or juggle your real job, wife, and kids. Ten weeks later you find yourself sitting in a bus stop, homeless, closing questions and rolling back edits on your phone. – Draco18s no longer trusts SE Jul 10 '17 at 14:47


This isn't what happened.

$timestamps instead of $timestamp

According to the help center, specifically the "To correct minor mistakes" point, this is an acceptable edit to make on an answer. It's fixing a typo, not changing what the answer says the code does. You can find further clarification in the FAQ: When should I make edits to code?.

Given that fixing this syntax error was enough to solve your problem, I don't see a problem with the OP getting reputation for this. Other than a minor typo, which was fixed, their answer was correct.


That comment happened 6 months later. The edit was both 8 months after the answer solved your problem and 2 weeks after someone else left their own answer using public instead of protected with an explanation that it's necessary when "using Laravel 5 or above".

According to this article, version 5 wasn't released until February 4, 2015: two days after you asked your question and got an answer. I don't know how fast Laravel users update which version they're using but it's likely that most of the up votes also came from people using versions older than version 5.

So the situation you're asking about didn't even happen here. This user did not get reputation for posting an incorrect answer. They posted a correct answer with a minor typo that didn't work for versions that came out after they created their post.

  • I find that "faq" contentious to say the least. The help center supports your position better and it's way more authoritative: To correct minor mistakes or add updates as the post ages. I suggest that you use that instead stackoverflow.com/help/editing – Braiam Jul 9 '17 at 21:37
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    @Braiam faq is officially recognized. Questions with that tag are authoritative, or at least represent community norms that have wide acceptance. You are expected to behave according to them. In particular, that FAQ question addresses the rather messy topic of editing code; it elaborates on how editing policy should be applied in that situation. So it's more directly applicable to this edit. – jpmc26 Jul 9 '17 at 21:43
  • @jpmc26 yet, anyone can edit it to conform with their views, just because. And if there's something even more authoritative than that, shouldn't that be preferred? When two documents contradicts each other, I prefer the more authoritative one, which in this case is the help center. For example, it wasn't until '16 when deduplicator tacked the "unless they are obviously not relevant to the question" caveat in the "dont's", which made it contradicts the help center "To correct minor mistakes". Also, it wasn't "faq" until '16. – Braiam Jul 9 '17 at 21:52
  • All in all, we should prefer the help center when it comes to editing, since its an angular piece of SO and it's too important for SE to not keep that guidance accurate and sane at all times. – Braiam Jul 9 '17 at 21:55
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    @Braiam No, the thing that's vague and confusing enough about a particular case to warrant an entry in the FAQ should not be more preferred to the thing that's dedicated to addressing it. And not anyone can edit it. Only those with enough rep. You'll note that question and answer have never experienced substantive edits that changed its meaning. Just minor rewording and format changes. Don't make up problems where they don't exist for sake of argument. – jpmc26 Jul 9 '17 at 22:03
  • @jpmc26 Anyone with +100 rep can edit, so yes, anyone is an apt choice of word. And that it hasn't changed despite all the discussion since then is all more the worrying. If the faq doesn't change to meet current expectations is as good as dead letter, which is why the help center is far more useful in this case, and it's specific enough to support BSMP, which is even explicitly stated. – Braiam Jul 9 '17 at 22:09
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    @Braiam: I find it extremely concerning that you're blowing off all of faq in principle based on some qualms that are admittedly not without merit, but are considerably less important in practice than suggested here. It would be nice to have e.g. a more robust CW system that allows multiple users to subscribe to edit notifications, but in the meantime, what we have does work generally fairly well. – Nathan Tuggy Jul 10 '17 at 0:15
  • @NathanTuggy I'm blowing up the faq because it has very concerning and real effects. On another post someone is using the very same "faq" to argue that the thing BSMP states that the "faq" allows is prohibited. How such thing can be considered to "work generally fairly well"? If the "faq" is something that you can interpret to argue diametrically opposite arguments, I question such categorization and search for the more authoritative source. (In case you are curious, here's the context which I find disturbing) – Braiam Jul 10 '17 at 0:24
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    @Braiam: My point was mostly that you're throwing out the entire tag, rather than saying "hmm, there's a bit of a glitch in this entry, which someone should fix or comment on". – Nathan Tuggy Jul 10 '17 at 0:34
  • @NathanTuggy I'm not throwing out the entire tag, just that the faq shouldn't be blindly trusted and that citing the help center is better for these cases (where editing is involved), since too much dogma has spilled through. – Braiam Jul 10 '17 at 0:37
  • Okay thanks @BSMP for the answer, I did not know the 2nd comment was for a newer version. Maybe I'm wrong in this specific case, but I'm still curious as to what the correct outcome would be would there be a case where there are larger edits – Loko Jul 10 '17 at 7:48

To address the question more generally:

If Person A posts an incorrect answer, and Person B edits the answer so it is correct, I can see why you'd hesitate to award Person A all the credit, rep, and privileges.

But. Note that Person B preferred to edit A's answer, rather than write their own. There's... probably a good reason for that?

Maybe A wrote a strong answer, and B considered their fix a minor one. Maybe A explained the situation well, even if the answer was wrong, and B felt that was valuable enough to be worth keeping. Maybe a bunch of people upvoted the wrong answer, because it sounds good, and B wanted to fix that one (in which case A was getting rep and privileges already).

Remember also that B can't edit A's answer without sufficient privileges and experience, or reviewer approval. Reviewers approving a fix that changes A's answer significantly is hard to get, if it happens, then again, probably there's something in this case that justifies it.

Long story short: Editing rather than answering was B's choice, and probably made for a good reason. Upvoting good answers is good for everyone. There's no need to second-guess edge-cases like this, unless you see something that looks like outright abuse of the system.

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