Editing somebody else's question to appeal to a broader audience

Question

This is my first time posting on any meta, so sorry if it's an inappropriate question in some way.

Before I had edit privileges, I gave a fairly popular answer to this question. A question was, in my opinion, a little bit too specific for a "growing knowledge base", as I usually look at SO and now DSP.SE, but I tried providing a general answer.

My answer is the only one, but as I indicated in the comment I left below the question, I think it would be good to have other people's input on this. I have also suggested to the author of the question to edit the question in a way I believe would still ask for the specific information from the original post, but also be appealing to a broader reader pool and call for a less specific answer.

Now, I got edit privileges. I can see that the OP of the question is regularly on the site, he just chose to ignore my comment: he didn't edit, or comment on why he thinks it is not a good idea. I would still like to see that post edited in that direction (edit it myself). I've looked through metas to confirm if my edit in the suggested direction would be considered good practice, or not, but I could not find anything useful.

Could you please give some general advice on when it is acceptable to edit other people's questions, and also, if you think it is a good idea to edit this specific post the way I would like to?

Edit I did not get edit privileges yet, just taught I did, but the rest of the question still applies.

Answer 1

I don't believe that editing is appropriate in for this specific case. Editing is meant for improving clarity of a question, not to change its semantics. A good rundown of when to edit is given here.

Nevertheless, the title of the question does appear to be a little misleading, so editing that to reflect the meaning of the question better would be appropriate. This would also largely solve the problem of appeal to a larger audience, since most of us search by title.