It's worth noting that it is possible to edit other people's answers. So it is possible to correct answers with incorrect or dangerous information.

With sufficient "rep" (2000, where an upvote on one of your questions or answers is worth 10), edits don't even require approval from others (before that, they must be peer reviewed before the edit takes effect)

Personally I find the "edit without peer review" too powerful, since you can do it for any question, regardless if you're supposed to be competent there or not; it would be better if it was limited for tags where you've got a bronze badge. Perhaps it's the lack of oversight which makes me a little wary. And 2000 rep isn't that hard to achieve, it just requires some persistence.

When I asked: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/276496/how-to-deal-...

I was explictly told "Inform and educate, don't censor!." -- which from context clearly means "don't edit answers just because they are wrong".

I believe the idea is that if you're editing questions early on you learn what the expectation for edits are. I reject a lot of edits in the system for being edits that should be submitted as their own answers or as comments to the post they're editing. Ideally, once a user has gone through the system for long enough and had enough edits rejected for improper use of the system they'll know what to do once they reach the higher rep threshhold.

In practice however???

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The system works well for fast and easy. A system like StackOverflow will never work well for highly specialized tasks and that's alright.

> The problem is stackoverflow seems designed to avoid "better answers".

SO is perfectly happy to accept better answers, especially to those which have gone stale and perhaps no longer applicable.

If you are offering further information that can benefit the reader its always welcome.

Its one of the reasons a lot of the more concise answers are not always the accepted answers. Because people do ask quite often : "Okay but why did that fix it"

In-fact : Answering without giving a proper reason for the solution is frowned upon mostly.

I've gotten multiple Tumbleweed badges for answering an old question with a better answer. You can't blame the system for the fact someone who either long ago fixed the problem or gave up doesn't come back to change the "correct" answer.

I can totally blame "the system", as it is exactly the system which doesn't make it easy for others to change the "correct" answer, when stackoverflow claims it isn't supposed to be a Q&A system for individual people, but for the community as a whole (hence why bad/repeated questions are deleted).

It suffers from a similar problem to Wikipedia, namely that the likelihood of your information being prominent is a function of how well you rules lawyer, rather than how good your information is.