[michaelt]

The majority of message boards have few people with message-editing powers, and using them (as opposed to just deleting a message) is a rare event. I've only moderated very small message boards, but we strictly avoided editing users' posts for content, because it would erode user trust if we made it appear that people had said things they hadn't said, for example.

That's in stark contrast to something like a wiki, where it's expected that people will edit one another's content. Of course, most wikis don't attribute editable content to named individuals!

If you look at a high-profile question in Stack Overflow, often the proportion of replies that have been edited by someone other than the author would be shocking on a typical message board - 18 out of 27 answers, for example [1]. I'm quite sure my posts on this site are edited far less well below 66% of the time - in fact I haven't noticed any being edited at all.

In other words, I would say stackoverflow has positioned itself between conventional message boards and wikis in terms of message-editing convention. It's unusual, but it seems to work for them.

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9329446/for-each-over-an...