should we edit a question when it leads to frame-challenging answers, whether they're valid or not.
Absolutely not.
Community Moderation
The goal of community moderation on IPS is to curate the quality of questions and answers, not the content. Now, there is some content curation that has to be done to ensure the quality (deleting spam, removing offensive/abuse posts, removing off-topic questions, etc...), but that should be the extend of our content curation.
Editing
As JAD mentioned in a comment
Be careful with making edits that invalidate most of the existing answers
This meta gives a great explanation of how and why to make edits.
The most important reasons for editing a post are:
- Fixing obvious grammar and spelling mistakes.
- Making posts easier to understand, which helps both readers and the original poster (e.g. could prevent a question from being closed or downvoted)
- Adding additional information only found in comments, so that new visitors don't have to read everything
- Embedding or re-uploading images, fixing formatting, etc.
You can find more about these guidelines here
When you edit other's posts, you're still editing the author's content. Therefore you should never …
- Change the meaning of the original post.
- Change subtleties that normally wouldn't matter (e.g. change spelling from British to American English, introduce your own writing style).
- Add something that doesn't relate to the actual post ("I have the same problem!" or "Here's something if you're interested … ").
Editing a post so that answerers will no longer post frame challenges is in direct violation of the first bullet point of when not to edit. Editing a question to prevent frame challenges would involve changing the frame of the question, which would deviate from the meaning of the post.
As far as the part about bad frame challenges. If you come across a badly constructed frame challenge you should moderate that post (down vote, request clarification, delete vote, etc...) rather than the question. So long as the question fits within the scope of the site, it is not in need of edits that don't fall under the bullet points listed above. If a post is receiving a large number of bad frame challenges, and they come from low rep users, it might be worth protecting the question, but no further action on the question is needed.
