Question: Recently I received some **very** negative feedback after editing [a question](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/64777/what-would-happen-if-a-bacterium-hijacked-human-gender-determination) (see comments and edit history). To me, parts of the question were unstructured, and needed clarification, but to the asker, they made sense.

I edited what I thought needed clarifying, and the OP told me my edits read terribly, made poor word choices, and were too hard for them to find a way to fix. I was told I did a sloppy job, and they said they were "really offended" by the changes I made.

I asked specifically what I did wrong, and while they did not reply, they have been active on the site since then. Clearly I did *something*, and I would like to avoid doing that something again, but I do not know what that is. For such an astoundingly negative response I expect a genuine reason for the OP to be upset, but it is not clear to me why.

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Is there a genuine reason to respond to an edit in such an overwhelmingly negative way; did I really do something "offensive" that is clear to others but not to me?

What should I do better if I am at fault so I don't receive such negative feedback in the future?

Answer: 
TL;DR: Unfortunately, you can't. Sorry. Some people will always dislike something.

Each question and answer on here is ultimately someone's baby. They may have just banged it out quickly without much thought or they may have conceived it with love and molded it into the exact perfect shape they desire. Whichever is the case, though, it's still their baby.

Some people will appreciate the help of others in raising their baby, helping to improve the clarity of communication, for example. Others will take it as a deep insult to their Q&A parenting skills if someone so much as tidies up a windswept semi-colon.

If people appreciate your help, then help them. If people don't (and especially if they are rude about it) then don't fret about it, move on and find people who do appreciate it. I assure you that the overwhelming reaction to helpful edits is gratitude.

In this specific case, I think the negative reaction came from the extent of your changes. The actual changes made look good to me and definitely improved the question. However, you just gave someone's baby a new hair cut and they took it personally, no matter that it was an improvement. The changes were too large for that particular OP to be happy with.

Some people don't want to be helped, some people are happy with a bit of help, others are comfortable with more extensive revisions. Unfortunately, it's hard to predict how people will react, so the main recommendation I can make is that your edits should change the question as little as possible while improving it as much as possible. A fine balancing act that's more art than science.
My two cents is that the original post was readable. Your edits were more readable, and didn't really alter the meaning of anything. So on sum, your edits were good. Except that, they weren't really needed in the first place.

So the question is: is it worth tweaking a decent question to make it read a little better?

My opinion is no. I try to only edit to either a. correct obvious grammar/spelling/capitalization or b. attempt to make an interesting but clearly close-worthy question (due to too broad, or unclear what you are asking) better enough that it doesn't get closed. If the post has problems but doesn't meet the above criteria, I prefer to nag them from the comments.

More philosophically, it is great when more people take ownership of Worldbuilding and attempt to make questions and answers better. But there is no 'right way' to do it. So its not that your edit was bad, but you just saw first-hand how needlessly editing a post, even if you are strictly editing in improvements, might conflict with the author's intent (somehow).