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I suggested an edit to this answer.

The edit came after I suggested the said changes in the comments (with 4 upvotes for the comment) and the author of the post told me it's better if I do it. So I obliged.

So why, while the author and I agreed the edit was necessary, was it rejected, even though the comments are pretty explicit about it? I don't really understand.

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2 Answers 2

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When you do a suggested edit, the only information besides the edit that is shown to reviewers is the edit reason. Yours was

Fixed the answer in regards to the question.

This does not indicate that you and the poster of the answer had agreed on this change. So the natural presumption was that you had chosen to make that change on your own. Yes, if they had clicked through to the answer, they might have been able to see differently (any such comment is now gone). But most reviewers won't do that most of the time.

In the future, please consider an edit reason like

As discussed with the answerer in the comments, fixed answer in regards to the question.

Then at least the reviewers would have had a particular reason to click through to the answer.

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First of all, your edit is totally legit (thank you!), and it should have been approved.

The edit was rejected because 2 of 2 reviewers voted so, and by the powers that be (the Stack Exchange software), that's enough to reject a suggested edit.

Your next question might be why did those 2 users vote to reject? Only they can answer that. But I'll venture a guess that they simply haven't seen the comments between you and the author. Had they seen the comments, it would have been clear that the change is approved by the author, therefore it should be accepted, and the reviewers would have voted to accept.

It seems that on the review page of a suggested edit, the comments are not visible. Reviewers must manually open the post to see that. That's a bit of extra work for reviewers. Especially when there are in fact no comments on a post, but to avoid false positives like this one, reviewers are forced to systematically open every post they review before making their decision. I think it will make sense to post a feature request on https://meta.stackexchange.com/ to include comments on posts in the Suggested Edit queue, for everyone's sake, if such request doesn't already exist.

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    \$\begingroup\$ Or the suggester could just put in the edit reason "as discussed with OP in comments". That requires no changes from SE and would work right now. Yes, the reviewers would still have to open the answer to see the comments, but at least they wouldn't have to do so on every edit. \$\endgroup\$
    – mdfst13
    Feb 17, 2018 at 5:15
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    \$\begingroup\$ @mdfst13 indeed, that's an excellent idea! \$\endgroup\$
    – janos
    Feb 17, 2018 at 6:39

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