Is there a mechanism to disown my own answer?

Question

A hypothetical scenario:

Another person has edited an answer of mine.

I don't deeply agree with how it looks now, and collaboration through comments and edits did not bring such a state that I would accept. I don't want my name to be associated with it.

But I still recognize and respect the contribution of the editor: they went to such a length in efforts to bring new info that I haven't gone to and would not have. (Say, it's about installing packages and verifying how they install and whether/how they work.)

At this point, deleting the answer would ruin their effort and sacrifice, and also deprive the community of both of our findings.

For such a case, is there a possibility to remove me, as the author of the answer? Furthermore, in such a way that would also protect my reputation against potential future downvotes on that answer?

Can I, the author of that answer, with my relatively low reputation, execute this mechanism?

If not, is there a recommended policy to follow in such cases?

Answer 1

If you want to transfer the ownership of the post from yourself to the community, you can simply make your post Community Wiki post.

From What are "Community Wiki" posts?:

Community Wiki posts work by partly transferring ownership of the post from the original author to the community. They make the post easier to edit and maintain by a wider group of users, but they do not contribute to any user's reputation.

To make your post community wiki, click on [edit] button and click on the Community wiki checkbox.

Answer 2

When you contribute a post on a Stack Exchange site, you grant the company a license to use your content. Under that license, you have a right to have that content disassociated from your identity, so the answer to your question legally has to be yes.

In fact this important question is addressed in this post on Meta Stack Exchange as an FAQ item.

As mentioned there, your reputation would no longer be affected by votes on the post, and any reputation changes that had previously taken place due to votes cast on it to date would be reversed.

In practice disassociation is rarely done and there's no button for it (ironically, you have no right under the CC BY-SA licenses to delete your posts, but in most cases you do have a button for that). You can use the contact form to make your request and it will be carried out manually. Note that it may take days (or even weeks) for anything to happen due to the community team being overloaded with work.

While I realise the scenario you described is hypothetical, and might indeed be one where a user would want to seek disassociation, I would suggest that in most such cases some alternative would be preferable, such as rolling back the edit and inviting the editor to post a new answer (based on yours, with proper attribution if appropriate) to share the information they wish to contribute.