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How might I contact a Member who has made unwelcome Edits on one of my Posts, preferably in private with no suggestion of complaint?

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    You can ask them in chat to provide an email, and tell them they have two minutes to erase the email. That gives you enough time to copy it. Of course, others might see it as well but it has worked fine for me twice.
    – Lambie
    Commented Jul 24 at 14:13

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Non-moderator users cannot contact other users of the site privately. If you'd like to discuss something with a person who has edited your post, you can leave a comment on that post @-mentioning the editor. Even if that user hasn't left a comment on the post, if they've edited it, an @-mention will notify them.

You can also drop into the site chatroom if you'd prefer a discussion less constrained to comments; chat is designed for extended back-and-forth while comments are not.

I don't know what edits you're referring to specifically, but as @shoover mentioned in the comments, Stack Exchange works much like Wikipedia, where content is collaboratively edited to improve the quality of the information and its presentation. As it says in the help center article on editing:

Editing is important for keeping posts clear, relevant, and up-to-date. If you are not comfortable with the idea of your contributions being collaboratively edited by other trusted users, this may not be the site for you.

With that said, sometimes edits are harmful or make changes for no good reason. In cases such as those, you have the option to roll back those edits. You can go to the revision history of the post and pick a revision to roll back to; the contents of the post will be reverted to the state that it was as of the revision you picked.
As an example, when you post something, the original version is revision #1. Somebody then makes an edit that doesn't improve or worsens the post, as revision #2. You can select revision #1 to roll back to in the revision history, and revision #3 will be identical to revision #1.

Note, however, that rolling back edits that actually improve the post is heavily frowned upon, and doing so repeatedly can result in a post being temporarily locked or even a suspension.

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  • Again, thanks Mithical. In my view, it's a bit annoying this topic was moved to Literature Meta in particular, rather than a general SE area. Before anyone tells us it arose from in a topic Literature, that doesn't change the fact that as the instigator, I intended any discussion to be purely about the process of contacting Members, not and specific content.
    – Robbie Goodwin
    Commented Jul 25 at 15:29
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    General questions about the system and the network are perfectly acceptable on per-site metas. However, if you had wanted to post in a more "general" location, you could have posted to Meta Stack Exchange. Since you posted this on the Literature main site, it was moved to Literature Meta.
    – Mithical Mod
    Commented Jul 25 at 16:03

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