It seems pretty clear to me that the two of you were editing simultaneously, which caused the confusion. Note that Mariano hasn't made any attempt to revert your rollback. Note also that Mariano's edit did not contribute to the conversion to CW. I really don't understand what there is to get worked up about.

If you're really worried that somebody will edit one of your posts in a way you don't want, you can flag it for moderator attention, asking for it to be locked. To some extent, this will take it out of circulation. People won't be able to comment or vote on it--locking is meant as a tool to avoid flame wars. You won't be able to edit it either. I would reserve this for situations where there is an actual edit war.

Australian, actually.

Cheers,

Matthew

Let's get back to the mathematics, eh?

Says the fake Canadian, eh?

;)

Let's get back to the mathematics, eh?

I'm inclined to take Mariano's word for it in view of the fact that Bill's first "revert" was not,in fact, logged as a revert, but as an editing change.

I confess that I am not very surprised by Mr. Dubuque's response. On a different post, he wrote about "Puiseaux series". If almost anyone else had written that, I would have edited it to "Puiseux series". But my experiences have taught me that it is not profitable to engage Mr. Dubuque on any issues except the most explicitly mathematical ones. I also find that (in my opinion, obviously) Mr. Dubuque very often expresses his opinions in unpleasantly extreme ways. He does, however, have a lot of mathematical insight: I try to keep my eye on that as much as possible.

Finally, I do think that if you copyedit someone's answer and your changes are rolled back, it is most polite not to make the changes a second time but rather (if you feel it's worth it) post comments to the answer or here at the meta site. [Added later: apparently it is not clear that this comment applies to the present situation. Please take it then as a general opinion.]

Your text is already CC licensed and editable by many users. Becoming CW just means you don't get further reputation from the post (no big deal, right? that's not what we're here for?) and that a larger pool of people are now allowed to edit. If anything, take having your post CW'd a badge of honour --- the post didn't languish in obscurity, but rather was read and digested by several people, to at least the level they thought they could contribute to it! Wow!

If you're really concerned about the fact the software gives you slightly less attribution after a post moves into CW mode, feel free to edit the post to add your signature as the last line.

I have historically corrected quite a few typos in both questions and answers, and this is what I did here. In particular, I have added diacritics a few times, in some cases with knowledge that the original author did not know how to type them, and in other cases with the presumption that that was the case. In this special case, I insisted in the edit because I assumed this was a case of simultaneous edits (it would not have been the first time) and because, according to the FAQ, the second edit would not have been counted in turning the answer into CW---not even in terms of author-count, I had already edited the answer.

(@Willie: "a space and a comma? Come on..", If you look at the changelog, you'll see that I changed that only the second time. It required zero energy to do, and it removed a typo. Maybe it is just me but typos do make things more difficult to read for me!)

I should add that the reason I committed some of the edits is because the preview window seems to have some problems, so the only way I could be sure how the jsmath would render is by committing them. Is there no sandbox which one can use to perform successive iterations avoiding the edit limit?

What problems, specifically? In the early days, there were some issues with the client side preview manager not matching up with how markdown is handled by the server, but I think all those have been resolved. Can you give a specific example of something where the preview did not match the final output?

Regarding a sandbox, you can try faketestsite.stackexchange.com. It's using MathJax instead of jsMath right now (we expect to switch MO to MathJax in the not-too-distant future), but just about any difference between the preview and final output should be apparent there.

Also, just a technical note: I am not sure if you can post another answer to a question if you have currently a deleted answer. I seem to remember that when clicking the delete button it warns you that you won't be able to make a new answer after deleting a current one. But I may be remembering incorrectly.

Though I would like to see moderators have the ability to remove CW status in exceptional cases, I think the current automatic mechanism is pretty good. It does happen that a post is forced into CW mode when it "shouldn't be" because the frequent editing was "legitimate", but I think it's pretty rare. There's hardly anything surprising or disturbing about the software not handling every case exactly right. Even if it were an option, I would be opposed to making the rules for when a post is converted to CW randomly more complicated.

Edit: btw, there is a mechanism in place to protect compulsive editors to some degree. Edits made within a five minute period all get counted as a single edit, not as a bunch of separated edits.

If you were having other problems, please described them. It may warrant a bug report.

You should really proofread and check over your typing before clicking submit...

I see no problem with you deleting/reposting (note: I have no authority at all), but I think that some people here might be annoyed if you circumvent the system. I say that you should just go for it and not worry about actual consequences, because at the absolute worst, the moderators will re-CW your answer if they feel so inclined.

I really hope you won't delete the post and repost it; you'll lose all the comments that way, and I think they are valuable.