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My purpose in asking this is to better understand what is wrong so I don't repeat the mistake.

I came across the following question, in which the author crafted an extremely complex, in-depth question regarding a highly complex issue: How to apply OEM customizations to Windows 10?
I suggested the following edit.

Generally speaking, I wouldn't ask why an arbitrary edit was rejected (when my edits have been rejected, I review the reasons, note what I did wrong, and strive to not repeat the mistakes), except in this specific case, the reasoning for the rejection appears to be a case of looking at the red vs green revisions and not actually reading the before and after, reviewing the content side-by-side, as the content in the author's original is completely and wholly present within the edit, with the only non-original content added (excl. formatting) being where incorrect terminology had been used, resulting in two reasons for rejection that are illogical to me within the context given.

  • Rejection reason 1: "This edit was intended to address the author of the post and makes no sense as an edit. It should have been written as a comment or an answer."
    • The edit wasn't a comment nor an answer (I'm unsure how either could be inferred)... it simply took a complex question that was all over the place and laid it out cohesively, so the reasoning given has me perplexed.

  • Rejection reason 2: "This edit deviates from the original intent of the post. Even edits that must make drastic changes should strive to preserve the goals of the post's owner."
    • I'm failing to understand how the edits made deviate from the original intent, per the above and below, as the author's goals were completely preserved.

Context

My intent with the edit was to cohesively present the complex questions the author was asking, organizing it in such a way that when anyone with the required knowledge went to craft their answer, they wouldn't have to repeatedly sift through the question for 5min each time they addressed what customization needed to go where in which of the seven Windows install phases.

  • This is crucial, as adding customizations to the wrong configuration pass will either result in a failed installation if using a LiteTouch or ZeroTouch install or result in the customizations altogether being skipped because they're in the wrong configuration pass (wouldn't be immediately apparent until after OOBE, or, if booting to audit mode, and with the level of customization requested, it would take a significant amount of time to manually verify).

    My edit grouped the customizations requested into, more or less, their constituent configuration passes.
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    The question is very long, and a lot of the bulk looks like nonessential information. The biggest improvement would come from slimming it down to just what's needed to understand the issue. I'm not sure to what extent your proposed edit makes it materially better, although it was a valiant effort. It might be better organized, but it's still too much for readers to wade through. If all of that is needed to explain the problem, the question probably isn't a good fit for this platform. (cont'd)
    – fixer1234
    Commented Jan 2, 2020 at 21:52
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    In general, changes of that scope are either too much change from the author's words, or too much change for reviewers to validate with confidence. Hopefully, your answer gives the OP what they need.
    – fixer1234
    Commented Jan 2, 2020 at 21:52
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    You should not read into the reasons the edit was rejected, the approval system isn't perfect and does not allow for custom reasons other than "does harm .." which isn't always appropriate. There isn't always a selectable reason to reject an edit.
    – Ramhound
    Commented Jan 3, 2020 at 5:44
  • @fixer1234: FYI, I just posted an answer referring to your comments. Commented Jan 14, 2020 at 6:34

1 Answer 1

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The comments by fixer1234 answer your question pretty well, but, since I’m one of the people who voted to reject your edit, I’ll confirm them, in a bit more detail.

  • The question, before your suggested edit, was over 900 words long (as computed by the “Word Count” function in Microsoft Word).
  • Your edit left ten words untouched (based on a visual inspection of the side-by-side comparison in the “rendered output” view):

    side-by-side comparison of suggested edit

    (OK, in the “markdown” view, it looks like about 25 words survived.)

  • So your edit clobbered about 98.8% (or at least 97.2%) of the original content.
  • Comparing the before and after versions by eye, they appeared to me to be two substantially different questions that, maybe, had some slight similarity.  It didn’t even look like a major rewrite; it looked worse than that.

In short, your suggested edit didn’t look like a revision of the original post; it looked like a different post.  My gut reaction was that the edit was changing WAAAY too much of the original post.

At the risk of piling on:

  • Your version of the question asks “How to implement the customizations below?”, and then doesn’t list them until eight paragraphs later.
  • Your version of the question talks about $OEM$, but doesn’t say what it’s talking about until 36 paragraphs later.
  • fixer1234 points out that the original version of the question is very long — but your version is even longer!
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  • I’m sorry it took me so long  to get around to posting this. Commented Jan 14, 2020 at 6:29
  • Thank you for taking the time to explain, I appreciate it. I disagree w/ your conclusion, as I believe it to be based on an erroneous foundational premise; if the rendered, non-diff output of the original vs the edit were compared side by side, they were almost identical in content but very different in formatting. I do understand the point your making, I simply disagree with the foundational premise. I am perplexed by the references to the author's questions, as I simply moved them from the bottom of the question to the top, which is where they logically should be. Regardless, thank you =]
    – JW0914
    Commented Jan 14, 2020 at 8:12
  • What would be the recommended way to go about a scenario like this should it occur again? I contemplated submitting the same question, but more cohesively laid out, and providing the answer, however that seemed wrong to me since the core content within the new question would have come from the author of the original question. Should I have proposed such a cohesive edit to the author in a comment, linking to my recommended edits on PasteBin?
    – JW0914
    Commented Jan 14, 2020 at 8:22

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