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[Silver] Silk purse - Edited someone else's question with a negative vote count which later reaches a score of 2 or greater before it is edited again by anyone else.

I'm reposting this (see original) since the badge question was locked, thanks Ether for the name.

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why was it locked? –  jmfsg Jul 28 '10 at 17:27
@Juan: "Locking ... I can not find anything here .. its ridiculous. – waffles♦" –  Jeff Yates Jul 28 '10 at 17:28
This doesn't seem like a silver badge, it's too easy –  Michael Mrozek Jul 28 '10 at 17:39
See discussion on: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/44582/… –  Shogging through the snow Jul 28 '10 at 17:45
@Michael: The score requirements could be changed if it needs to be harder. –  Gelatin Jul 28 '10 at 17:48
@Simon That would be good. The way it is now, someone could take a newly posted good question, downvote it to -1, edit it, reverse their vote to get the question at +1, and wait for one more upvote to get the badge. It probably needs limits in both directions, but something like "Edited a question with -5 votes" encourages people to wait until a question is downvoted before editing it, which is also bad –  Michael Mrozek Jul 28 '10 at 17:55

2 Answers 2

up vote 4 down vote accepted

This is a great idea! Finally we have an incentive to not give up on people and encouragement to generate great questions from confused seeds.

I seriously love the idea.

I don't necessarily think the implementation will work.

  1. This may encourage people to completely change the question, rather than just reform it.

  2. There are some questions which actually need to be closed. If they are offensive or abusive, we would want the user to be punished for the behaviour, not rewarded with upvotes.

  3. This could also be gamed by piggy-backing on someone else's edit.

  4. Because the OP is still getting upvotes, they haven't really learned any sort of lesson about writing good posts.

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I think implementation problems like the ones in devinb's answer were the reason this failed the last time it came up, but there wasn't much discussion about it. I really would like to see this happen, because people have a bad habit of seeing a poorly worded but perfectly valid question and moving their mouse straight past "edit" to "close", which I would very much like to discourage. It becomes a race, where the editors try to fix up the question before the closers get 5 votes in, because once the question is fixed the close votes will stop, but if it closes first it's almost impossible to reopen

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