A recent question on the main site requests an English equivalent of a Hindi proverb rassi jal gayi par bal nahi. Evidently the poster feels that a key feature of the Hindi expression is an element of sarcasm. Subsequently, however, an editor revised the original question on the basis of a very different understanding of the expression's connotations—and, in a comment beneath the posted question, provided a citation that seems to support this other understanding.
As I write this question, the poster has reinstated the gist of the original question after the editor's initial edit, and the editor has re-revised the question to reflect the contrasting understanding. I'm not interested in this disagreement as a specimen of an edit/rollback tug-of-war, but as an instance in which such a dispute may have a strong bearing on the question's value to the site.
If the editor is correct that the original poster's understanding of the Hindi expression is idiosyncratic, I think that offering a nonsarcastic/nonpejorative English equivalent of the Hindi proverb would be of greater long-term value to EL&U visitors than offering an English equivalent that is closer to the original poster's understanding of the proverb. But even if we suppose that the editor is correct about the actual nature of the proverb, that sense of the phrase is clearly not the one that the poster wants to find an English an equivalent for.
My question is this: In a case where—arguably—the edited version of a question is of much broader interest (because it may reflect a more accurate understanding of the expression at issue) than the original posted version of the question, should we accommodate the better question at the expense of the original poster's actual question, or should we preserve the original question and (in this case) risk misleading site visitors about the nature of the source expression that the poster is asking about?
