Teamwork - editing your answer based on another answer or comment

Question

This will be related to teamwork on this question:

So we all had some ideas and I really don't want to:

1. Accuse anybody of stealing my ideas - it is great to see somebody use and enhance it or even make the incomplete idea (preprocessing + different structure in this case) into complete solution. I cannot even claim it was my own idea, it was just an idea. Anybody could make it up without reading my answer and/or comments.
2. Steal anybody's idea making it my answer / solution: Lukazoid is now working on the preprocessing during loading, I have edited my answer based on his, asking author of the question for the loading-phase code and a hint, that it could possibly be solved there completely. Lukazoid did not join it into one phase and there is currently no code doing the preprocessing, just a note he has it but needs more work.

My options:

1. Not doing that. That could hurt the outcome - perfect solution.
2. Passing my answer to community wiki. This sounds like good idea, I would gain no benefit, no reputation points from it.
3. Just let it be as it is. Is that bad?

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EDIT: The solution taken was to move the added part to comment and placing small note about it in the original answer, while pointing out that the height map is in fact already the 2D/3D structure that can be used to find the neighbours. That makes it unique, without actually using anything from the second answer. (Of course there was something injected in the thought process from it, but I don't feel like stealing anything now, I have pushed my own original idea one step further.)

Answer 1

You raise an important issue. From time to time, other answers on a question that you are answering will…

1. contain ideas that you hadn't previous thought of, but agree with

   Upvote that answer. If you also have some substantial thoughts of your own that have not been mentioned by anyone else, write an answer.

2. mention similar thoughts that you arrived at independently

   If you were authoring your answers at about the same time, I think that it's fair for both users to post their answers without any implication that either user stole the other's ideas.

3. spark new ideas in your own mind

   I think this is the situation that you're asking for advice to deal with.

   Collaborating on a community wiki answer is probably not a good approach, for the reason you stated: nobody earns reputation for their work. If we were contributing to a canonical answer on a topic of general interest, such altruism might make sense. However, such general reference questions don't exist on Code Review. Furthermore, code reviews are by their nature opinionated, which makes it hard to write a single answer as a joint effort.

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For the purpose of writing a review of the code included in a question, it suffices to mention that, say, preprocessing the model during the loading phase would be beneficial. If you want to suggest that the author post the code that performs the loading, that would be best expressed in a comment. Should the author decide to post such code, it would be done in a follow-up question.

It's important to remember, though, that despite your enthusiasm to help, it is still the original poster's project. You don't actually need to see the world-loading code; you merely need to plant the idea that part of the optimization needs to occur there. I believe that @Lukazoid's answer has already fulfilled that purpose. A supportive comment from you would have sufficed.

Answer 2

When looking at the 2-minute tour:

Code Review is a question and answer site for sharing code from projects you are working on for peer review.

In scientific peer reviews, peers are usually not aware of each other. They do their work alone. They suspect/know others are reviewing it as well but they don't know who those others are.

At Stack Exchange, it's different. The moment you post something, it can be read by the author and others. So, let's continue the tour:

This site is all about getting answers.

Does collaborating help getting answers? Yes.

Is it therefore in the best interest of this website to use each others posts for better answers? Yes.

Our goal is to have the best answers to every question, so if you see questions or answers that can be improved, you can edit them.

Improve answers. That's part of how this site works.