Edit that updates obsolete command-line parameters gets rejected?

Question

Yesterday I came across this Chocolatey answer, but, surprisingly, the proposed command-line didn’t work. I then noticed several comments mentioning that the mentioned command-line parameter was obsolete. These comments are already up to 2 years old and the original author didn’t react.

I thought “lets be useful for the next guy” and suggested an edit to update the command-line. It’s still the same command, does the same thing, but without the obsolete parameter that now causes it to fail. I was careful enough to keep the old command for people who use an older version of Chocolatey.

I still consider this as a minor change – and I wouldn’t have considered it acceptable to just remove the parameter (could be seen as vandalism). I think I followed these guidelines, even if the comments suggesting the change are not my own. I don’t think it would make sense to downvote and post my own answer.

Yet my edit was rejected, suggesting it should be a comment or an answer. Is this expected?

I have seen some answers on meta that suggest reviewers shouldn’t verify the technical accuracy of the change, in which case, maybe it makes sense to reject? But it contradicts the guidelines I linked above. I’m more used to the SO guidelines which tells reviewers to skip if they aren’t sure.

Answer 1

I overuled the edit rejection. I get that that's a major change but there's no information loss from your edit.

I can't/won't really speculate on the rejection reasons, but I think that's a perfectly cromulent edit.

Answer 2

In general, I often reject edits like these because it should be its own answer. It is OK for there to be multiple valid answers and you have the points necessary to post your own answers. The marked answer is only to indicate the answer that most helped OP, and other answers can and should be reviewed by any others searching for answers.

As an extension to the above, if another answer already contains the information the edit adds, then the edit essentially makes one or the other of the answers a duplicate, which we don't want to encourage. Unique answers should remain unique.

I don't recall whether or not I was one of the reviewers of this edit, but I believe I declined similar edits in the past few days.

Answer 3

I think this is a good reason to post your own answer, downvote the now incorrect answer, and leave a comment there.

I get that it feels weird and competitive, but this is a perfectly acceptable scenario to do that. Of course, suggesting an edit is also a perfectly acceptable way, so you just need to choose.

Suggesting edit would make sense better when there are already multiple answers and the accepted answer has a lot of votes, but that doesn't mean you can't try to post your own answer.