Why was my question locked, instead of deleted?

Question

I requested for a question to be deleted, but instead, it was locked by Philipp:

My request was simple, delete the post (my question) since it's been modified so much by editors that it's not written in a way I personally wrote the question and I personally feel the way it's written now is entirely not the way I'd ask such a question.

I wrote the question with my time, received an answer and accepted it already, yet people kept on editing it. I accepted a few changes but then the title was changed too so I requested moderators for to delete it since I couldn't do it myself...

Request to moderators...

"feel free to wipe my username off of it and wiki community it since it's so important to you (the moderator) that you need to "lock" it in a state where I'm the owner yet the content isn't mine anymore."

Why was it locked instead of being removed as the "flag comment" to the moderators requested?

• Since it keeps reverting changes back every time I make then, I vandalized my question instead because it's my question and I thought it'd help escalate my request (to get it removed instead)!!

Answer 1

When you contribute to Stackexchange, the content you post isn't only your content anymore. It becomes the content of the whole stackexchange community.

Our goal is to collect good questions and answers. So I am really reluctant to delete a question when the question is

1. on-topic
2. has received a good answer

Doing so would destroy useful content. It would also be disrespectful towards those who helped to fix the question and the person who invested work into posting the answer.

So when you requested your question to be deleted, I weighted the pro's and con's.

Pro:

• MagicallyDelicous is happy

Con:

• The community loses an on-topic question
• The community loses a good answer
• It would encourage the behavior of self-vandalizing content to force a deletion
• It would discourage making constructive edits to questions in order to rescue them from deletion

I decided that the needs of the whole community outweighed the needs of one user.

Answer 2

So, the reason the post was locked was given in a comment ("vandalistic editing"), and the edit in question was revision 7 (I'm not going to link to it because you didn't link to it and I'll respect that).

The lock seems justified to me. You had written a post that asked a certain question, and the answerer put time and effort into providing you with an answer. You then completely obliterated the post and overwrote it with an entirely different topic. Edits that invalidate answers are generally frowned upon, and in addition your specific edit was rather... extreme, shall we say. A moderator could reasonably be expected to lock it at that point if they believe they see the warning signs of, say, a forthcoming rollback war (whether their prediction of the future was accurate or not doesn't really matter, it's a fair move on their part).

That said, you did the right thing by coming here, although the way you've worded your post here could use some work, I think.

Your request:

My request was simple, delete the post since it's been modified so much that it's not my content.

Appears very reasonable in a general sense, although in this particular case, to be fair, nobody else really made any major edits to your post prior to your major edit, so I'm not sure your reason "it's been modified so much that it's not my content" necessarily stands here (there was revision 3 but you added clarification in revision 4, aside from that there weren't really any other edits done by other people).