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In Automatic Lease Renewal Laws in Washington State the OP asked if a particular law, to which a link was given, applied to a particular situation. It was clearly not a request for legal advice, because the OP said the matter had been settled by tenant and landlord signing a new lease, so it was a curiosity-based question about what the law would have provided had agreement not been reached.

It turned out that the section of law cited applied to mobile home lots, and the law that applies to house rentals is different (with yet a third section applying to commercial leases). An answer has now been provided that cites the two applicable sections of state law, and analyzes the more complex one.

After that answer was posted, and edit was made removing the backstory and details, with the stated reason:

Removed irrelevant situation (Law SE cannot provide legal advice to specific situations, and OP has since changed to seeking similar laws, making it doubly unnecessary).

It is my view that the situation given in the original question significantly helped other understand the reason for the question, and how the answer applied to this and similar situations, exactly as SE threads should do. Law SE threads can and often do respond to quite specific situations and hypothetical as long as they are not requests for legal advice, which this was clearly not, as mentioned above.

I have therefore rolled back the edit above. But I am bringing it here for discussion.

Should this or a similar edit have removed the situation described in the original question? Why or why not?

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Obviously it is my view that the edit should not have been made, or I would not have rolled it back. I think that the description of the detailed situation significantly enhanced understanding of, and interest in, the thread as a whole, and also explained the presence of two different answers citing different sections of law.

Situations with as much or more detail are often included in questions, and are not routinely edited out unless they seem to constitute requests for specific legal advice.

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    Given that no portion of any answer relied on information from the story, why would it be claimed the story is helpful for guiding answers? And once the question is reduced to "here is law for motor home, is there corresponding law for fixed-place home" how does a tangent on someone not liking the renewal of their lease have any relevance?
    – user4657
    Sep 17, 2021 at 22:09
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    Actually there was no story on a person not liking the renewal, there was a story about the landlord failing to take action. There seems to have been no dispute once action was taken. The story helps a reader understand in which situation these laws might be relevant, or at least one such way. I did not say it helped guide answers, I said it helped readers understand them.
    – David Siegel
    Sep 17, 2021 at 23:00
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    Answers should not require information from elsewhere to be understood. If they do, they are not self-contained and complete, and should be edited to make them so. The question is not involved in that process.
    – user4657
    Sep 18, 2021 at 2:56
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    @Nij Answers do and normally should require information from the question. An answer that repeats everything in th4e question is often being overly redundant. Information from external sources should be at least summarized if not quoted in full, but when the external source is long, it is often better to summarize, perhaps with a key quote, and refer rto the source for further possibly relevant inf. After all, we cannot pack everything reader might want to know into a reasonable answer here, although mine are often on the long side.
    – David Siegel
    Sep 26, 2021 at 15:14
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Should this or a similar edit have removed the situation described in the original question? Why or why not?

No. The edit was unwarranted. Rolling back was the right decision.

A user's inability to grasp the relevance of details in a post does not imply that the details themselves are irrelevant. Here, the relevance and implications of the OP's details are pointed out in Nate Eldredge's comment. The edited version is quite generic and unlikely to prompt others to contribute with educational remarks. That is because generic and/or trivia questions not only make it more difficult for us to identify what exactly an OP needs to know, but also because such questions oftentimes are uninteresting and tiresome to address.

Furthermore, the OP's disclaimer was of utmost clarity in that his underlying matter had been solved and that he only sought to improve his understanding of the law.

Besides being relevant, the OP's description is intelligible and well written. One should bear this in mind.

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  • This post has been changed so that it is no longer "abusive to others". Don't roll it back.
    – Dale M Mod
    Oct 11, 2021 at 4:07
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    @DaleM "This post has been changed so that it is no longer "abusive to others". Don't roll it back." In my reply to RyanM's comment I explained why my answer is not "abusive to others" at all, but you removed also those comments so that your action looks less arbitrary. It is ironic that I talked (without singling out anyone) against censorship of posts and then you insist to suppress that as well.
    – Iñaki Viggers
    Oct 11, 2021 at 9:13

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