Comment by Yizahi

There can be a collaborative work site and there can be a chain of posts type of site (e.g. forum or reddit or HN here). But trying to mix these concepts without any control or organization procedures is, was and will always be considered ridiculous by a vast majority of humans in all spheres of life. If SO wished to be an iterative collab site, sure it may have done everything it did and allowed mods to pick and copy any answers and parts of answers into a new, better refined answer penned by them. But just allowing random edits of any posts by any author, just twisting what they said is absolutely idiotic and ask any internet user of any age, they will agree with me, not with SO policy.

Wikipedia is often brought into comparisons with SO either as something close or as something vastly different. But it doesn't matter atm. What I want to highlight is that SO allowed on it's site to essentially go to the Talks page of Wiki page and allow editing of all user comments to change their words in retrospect, and also allowing to go to the edit history allow edit that history too. This is what SO did, no wonder there are almost no humans who would approve this (after explicitly explained to them, SO is mostly banking of user's lack of full picture knowledge and ignorance).