Edit to an answer, adding more relevant information, rejected by author because it's "not their intent"

Question

https://space.stackexchange.com/a/50284/6449

Someone commented below the above answer that it was missing information regarding the range of rovers using RTGs, so I edited that answer to include that information, thus making it more complete. The whole point of the Stack Exchange network, after all, is to encourage high-quality questions and answers, and adding more information to an answer would appear to me to be increasing its quality. For accepted answers, like this one, having as authoritative an answer as possible would appear to be most desirable.

However, the author of the answer rejected my edit, claiming in a comment that it "wasn't [their] intent". I don't understand how a factual answer can have intent, and even if it does I don't understand how that intent is in any way relevant to adding more facts to that answer.

I would appreciate an explanation as to whether this is indeed how Space.SE is curated.

Answer 1

I don't understand how a factual answer can have intent...

Go to meta FAQ and find What are the review queues, and how do they work? and see that one of the reasons that Stack Exchange provides for rejecting a proposed revision is:

• clearly conflicts with author's intent: it modified the post so that it may no longer be what the author meant it to be

Stack exchange answers should be fact-based, but answers are not facts, they are authored posts.

We can edit to attempt to improve them, but the community including the author can reject those proposed changes.

This is how Stack Exchange works so well. Like everything else involving humans and especially the internet, it's a delicate balance of wills.

You were invited to post your own answer, which you could have since this site is quite accepting of multiple and supplemental answers, and then it was pointed out that the proposed addition duplicated what was already in another answer.

I haven't verified that, but one way or the other the post author felt it was outside the scope of what they'd intended their answer to contain. That user has a long history of excellent and authoritative answers here, so I'd guess it was a reasonable take on the situation.