The question is what-is-substitute-for-rum-in-baking and I made a mistake while answering it, but I was corrected with a comment.
I feel I should edit my answer to fix this, but then the comments will appear strange. Also, maybe someone could benefit from learning the way it is.
What should I do?
Note: I agreed with hobodave and yossarian and edited the my answer and left a comment, thanks all for clarifying the priorities!
Edit it to be correct. There's no need to leave the wrong answer in the body, it can confuse people, and it also just adds noise. The goal of the site is to provide accurate expert answers, this takes precedence over whether a comment makes sense.
Typically, once edited, you would leave a comment directed @ the person who pointed out your error to let them know you fixed it. They can then delete their comments if they so choose. If they don't, and I or another moderator stumble across it, we will delete the no longer relevant comments.
I would leave your answer as is and write an "Edit: as per comment below" note above or below the original text. Either that or work with the comment author such that you edit your answer and he or she deletes the comment.
For the most part, I agree with hobodave's answer. I would only add that if you need to remove a significant part of your answer and doing so would result in a long comment thread making no sense, you can consider striking out the text. For example:
This is the paragraph that turned out to be wrong and generated 12 comments. Blah blah blah, yackity shmackity, lorem ipsum, tally-ho, et cetera.This is the rest of the answer, which may have been added afterward or may have always been here since the beginning.
You format it like so: <del>deleted text</del>
Again, I would suggest that people only use this when you're about to make a major change to your answer, enough to cause all kinds of confusion. These edits are rare, but they do happen; if you're not sure whether or not you should use strikeout text, then you probably shouldn't. It will be very obvious when that's what you need to do.
Whether you choose to use strikethrough or just delete the incorrect information, please do edit your answer to be correct. Incorrect answers are not beneficial to the question author, the community, or Google searches, so you should revise any answers that are partially wrong and delete ones that are completely wrong.
