Was this answer edited too heavily?

Question

This question about patent infringement yielded a few moderately contentious answers, as judged by the number of flags on the question. One of them simply stated that China was a dictatorship with little respect for the American patent system. That answer received a lot of comment discussion about whether the answer was sufficient or whether it was baseless accusations. I then edited the answer, adding a number of links to sources on China's IP policy and removing the unsourced comments. A few people commented that my edits went too far.

Were my edits inappropriate?

Note: Please try to disassociate the diamond here from the activity. If you don't wish to, that's your prerogative, but any 20k+ user can see flags on questions. I edited in the mindset of a member of this site, not as a moderator.

Answer 1

You can't do much in China. China is a dictatorship, and it appears to have a national policy of hacking businesses to steal their code and data. No reason to expect them to respect your rights to your PhD thesis.

I don't see anything salvageable in there. The intention clearly is to write that China is a terrible country and has no IP protection at all. Replacing this with a correct nuanced view is against the spirit of this paragraph.

As you say that your advisor works for a UK university, you might be able to do something there. I have no idea if that's a good idea or not. Similarly, if anyone tries to claim rights to your invention outside of China, it's possible you could do something.

So the author has "no idea" and says that some unspecified action might be possible or desirable or not, as long as it's not in China where it's certainly not possible.

This is augmented with actual facts which weren't even hinted at in the original.

Lastly, while certainly suspicious, I wouldn't take it as proven that your advisor was responsible, at least not based on what you've written.

This last paragraph is good and important and the only reason I see to keep the answer around at all.

But it's the last paragraph, and so I assume it was vastly overshadowed by the anti-China views expressed in the first and second paragraph in the decision process of the up and down voters.

I think it's anti-democratic and against the spirit of this network to subvert the votes of so many people towards an entirely different answer.

If undesirable content is upvoted I think in general it makes more sense to:

1. Add good other answers and trust in the users to upvote them more.
2. I've also seen special notes added to answers (outside the answer text) which say that it's not up to the standards of a site.
3. As a last resort deletion is more honest than to change an answer into its opposite, even if it means the answer would be trimmed down to the one useful sentence.

(no hard feelings)

Answer 2

"One of them simply stated that China was a dictatorship with little respect for the American patent system."

"Simply stated" isn't quite correct, it also answered the question, and the statements about China are supporting information for the answer. The answer given is to do nothing.

I didn't see any reason for the answer to be flagged or edited. It's firmly critical, but reasonable.

Answer 3

Just to post what I was thinking at the time, no, this was not inappropriate. The original question simply stated that "China is a dictatorship" (which is irrelevant here) and that they "have a national policy of hacking and stealing" (which both isn't true and is pretty slanderous). The edits added some background for readers unfamiliar with the actual situation. Granted, much of this is pretty public knowledge—I found all the links on the first page of a pretty straightforward Google search—but that doesn't mean everyone knows it.