I made an edit to an answer. I feel the edit is a clear improvement in terms of spelling and format.
The user sent me an angry email and rolled back the edit.
I thought it was funny, so I made the edit again.
Does a user have a right to not format and use incorrect spelling?
No. Every so often we have a new user who thinks they maintain total control over the content they post, but the FAQ is pretty clear about this:
Editing is important for keeping questions and answers clear, relevant, and up-to-date. If you are not comfortable with the idea of your contributions being collaboratively edited by other trusted users, this may not be the site for you.
I like to hope that enough of us remember what it was like being new and low on damage points to understand what is happening here more thoroughly than some simplistic FAQ-waving. For one, I remember.
The critique that people edit posts just to gain points is not an uncommon one, and people do encourage people to make such edits substantive ones as much as they can. Whilst that is not true here, the editor of the question does not help to demonstrate that it is not true by saying that xe repeated the edit because "I thought it was funny". Xe would help more by pointing out that it was a substantive edit that corrected grammatical errors such as mis-spelling the pronoun "I".
From the new user's perspective, remember, what happened here was that
We all have to remember what the process looks like to the people who do not have the accrued damage points that we have; and what our actions look like. It does not behoove us to call someone a vandal who clearly is not, any more than it behooves us to go around calling people "noob kali users". We know what questioner vandalism actually looks like, and it is far from simply clicking on the "reject this edit" button that the site gives to authors when their questions have suggested edits, which is what in fact happened here.
It does not behoove us to explain that we did edits because "I thought it was funny", and when we use the edit summary "Add formatting" it should not be that much of a surprise when people naïvely take us at our word and think that adding formatting was what we did.
And it does not help to then inflame the process by mis-characterizing this on Meta as the original author wanting "to not format and use incorrect spelling", especially when the original author made a spelling correction of xyr own and so very clearly did not want that.
In addition to the things that the regular users around here could have done better in this situation after remembering what an opaque system Stack Exchange is to novices, from being aware that people see edit summaries and "reject edit" buttons to not calling someone a vandal for rejecting a suggested edit and telling them in essence to just go away, is also remembering that novices come here with preconceived and wrong ideas based upon how other sites work.
They put "SOLVED" into questions. They put entire answers into questions. They think that posts should contain "Thank you in advance.". They use wacky markup conventions, such as the original questioner here using curly brackets. They bring in silly prejudices, that they have learned from decades of people wrongly saying how bad these things are, against "rich text" formatting such as boldface, italics, and monospace. (This is especially antithetical here on Unix & Linux, given the text processing history of Unix going back to the 1970s, and the fact that we've had things like boldface and italics in our document processing tradition for all of that time.)
So whilst the original edit was a good one, a lot of subsequent steps, from the edit summary onwards, have been mis-steps. This is not as vastly one-sided as the votes on answers here might lead one to think. The votes simply tell us that there have been only two extreme positions expressed until now, one telling us the received wisdom that one can still receive from all over the place today that formatting in questions is "shit" and one telling a novice to just read the FAQ and go away because "this site is not for you".
I suggest a less extreme position of remembering what it is like to be a novice, complete with these daft and wrongheaded learned prejudices against any sort of text styling.
And far from "this site is not for you" I suggest that this site may well appeal to you, once you un-learn the unfortunately pervasive but quite wrong received wisdom that you have that one should not use in questions the same simple kinds of text styling for the literal text of commands and output that our operating systems' own manual pages have been using for the past almost half a century. As well as the idea that sentences end with full stops. ☺
The edit was OK.
The user's angry retort via e-mail was not OK.
Your pointing fingers at the user and actively seeking conflict instead of trying to understand their feelings and resolve this peacefully was not very OK, either.
Stackexchange does not look like a wiki. It looks like a more conventional forum, e-mail, or even a science magazine, where every post is "owned" by its creator, and it's understandable newer users may take it very close to heart when someone twists their words without their explicit consent. This striking difference in netiquette may cause a lot of grief to some new users unless it's thoroughly explained (and it usually isn't).
Personally, I think the least "offensive" way to suggest edits would be either via comments, or by leaving a more thorough explanation why you thought the edit was needed.
The subtleties of a person's tone and intent generally do not make it through in writing. That gets exponentially compounded by differences in cultures (and language). Add to that the knee-jerk responses that online communication cultivates, and emotions can get raw very quickly.
I fully agree with @JdeBP's answer, particularly:
novices come here with preconceived and wrong ideas based upon how other sites work
To make it even more confusing, when a novice comes from SE to SE Meta, those wrong ideas are compounded, as the same SE user interface is used, but the meaning behind the votes is completely different. The negative votes against @user261897 in his answer here would have almost certainly alienated him further (let alone some of the comments).
The truly sad thing is that the user (user261897) has left SE - one who was willing to offer answers and help. In my opinion, he is likely owed an apology, particularly since you have his email address - perhaps even from a moderator.
Aside: as a low-rep user, when I come across a post that could use polishing, I occasionally do take the time to clean it up. Sure, the extra rep points won't hurt, but far more importantly, I do it just for the sake of making it better (on various SE sites). A few of my edits have been rejected, and admittedly there's a sting to that. Both sides here have had a sour experience, when each was beginning off with the best of intentions.
...Now, as I hit Post Your Answer, I'll go put on my thick skin as everyone prepares to tear my post apart :-)
Editing is important for keeping questions and answers clear, relevant, and up-to-date.
My answer was clean, relevant and up to date. There is no need to change nothing if you are not adding useful info.
I appreciate you correct me if I write bad words, or I can explain better because my english is too bad and I need a correction most of the time { I will learn more with this}
But you just added formating while is no need to do because my answer is very readable and the user can see the info he needs.
Edits are to correct and improve. The user will have no sense between your edits and my original post.
I don't like your arrogance.
I thought it was funny so I made the edit again.
You said two times this site is not for me just because I don't wanna let you do useless things.
The text is short and readable. It needs CSS?
Why instead of add formatting aren't you including more info or looking for other texts which really needs your help, and I'm not talking about formatting, I mean wrong words, or explain better.
No.
You prefer block my post and don't let me edit it in future time, and let my answer with your changes.
You shouldn't have the right to do that because you are acting with arrogance {both}
