This issue's come up before. My guess at an explanation is that the software assumes that if a post is being edited many times, it is being edited by many people, so the corresponding reputation should no longer "belong" to the original poster. That, or maybe it was designed to prevent malicious editing from negatively impacting the original poster's reputation.

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.

@Bill: I totally agree, but there is nothing we can do. It is built into the software. If you had just quietly deleted your post and reposted it in a new answer, I don't think anyone would have noticed/cared, but I think now that you brought people's attention to it, you might have a tougher time.

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.

Also, the system as it is has the side benefit of forcing people to be more careful about what they write.

Sorry, but there's no way for me or any other moderator to remove CW status from a post (see this meta.SE request). The software forces a post into CW mode after edits by four different users or after eight edits. The basic reasoning in the case of four different users is that it stops being reasonable for one person to accumulate rep when it's not so clear who "owns" the material any more. The basic reasoning in the case of eight edits by the owner is that the mechanism prevents people from trying to game the software (e.g. by bumping their question/answer once every 30 minutes). I'm pretty convinced that both of these mechanisms need to be there in some form.

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.

@Bill: I just started a new thread on the very matter in your last post. Please take a look and comment!

@Bill: yeah, unfortunately jsMath is platform dependent. It works almost perfectly in Firefox for me, but I hit odd rendering problems every now and then with Opera.

@Mariano: being a curmudgeon myself about typos and such, I sympathize with the urge. In the end it probably just boils down to our different level of tolerance. By-and-by, I wasn't pointing fingers or anything; it was just a poor way of saying that you made some changes which I personally would not have bothered with (even had I the power).

I would not interpret accent marks as being "pompous", and I should hope that most other people here would not either.

Am I correct in guessing that the "emphasis" Bill is referring to is italicization of "piece de resistance"? If so, I'd guess Mariano did not intend the italicization as emphasis. It is common (not universal) practice to italicize phrases from foreign languages.

Mariano's edits consisted of italicizing and adding proper French accents to the phrase pièce de résistance. This is a rather standard copyediting practice for foreign phrases in English text in general and for this phrase in particular: e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piece_de_resistance. Copyediting of posts on SO sites is (at least) implicitly encouraged by the existence of the "Strunk and White" badge.

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.]

Also, guys, for what it's worth, Mariano already explained that he (perhaps mistakenly) believed that Bill's first revert was a case of "simultaneous editing," and thus entered his changes a second time. (About 19 posts up.) This suggests to me that he didn't mean it to be ill-mannered or ill-willed.

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.