Askbot allows questions and answers to be changed after then have been entered. But I'm not clear on under what circumstances this is desirable. I can imagine two different basic modes of use:
- Editing of previous questions/answers is done just to clean up minor mistakes, but the "chronological" flow of the discussion is maintained.
- Major editing is done of questions and answers such that, at the end of the discussion what remains is the clearest exposition of the question and answer(s).
After a couple of comments posted earlier and reading some of the askbot documentation, I get the impression that #2 is how askbot was originally intended to be used (but I might be wrong). This does make sense, and would differentiate an askbot site from a typical "forum." However, to get this to work would (I think) require that everybody who is involved with a particular question sort of keep track of things and edit their answers accordingly. Otherwise, if some folks change what they wrote and others don't, some text will be "orphaned" so to speak, and the whole thing won't make a lot of sense to someone looking at it later.
There's a practical side to my asking this, which is that I have a current question now which has gotten rather messy ("Building ATLAS" below) and I'm considering reformatting the question with all the information I now have, and deleting me earlier "answers" -- is this a good idea?
Feedback please!
-Mike
