Coming from the worldbuilding stack, I've been judge to these things over there too - from both perspectives.
To give a simple answer:
Edits are meant to improve a question. This most often means formatting the text or fixing orthographic & grammatical mistakes. Thus generally okay and desirable from the point of views of the site and the author are:
- fixing the wrong spelling of words
- replacing complex words with simpler words (to some extent)
- structuring a block of text into paragraphs
- indenting code so it is displayed with the code formatting
- indenting quotes so they are displayed as such
- fixing links to other sites (and optionally quoting their contents if necessary for the question)
- correctly linking images or even uploading them to imgur and linking to the original source
The above things strive to improve readability of the question. They also aim to improve consistency between questions on the stack and making sure that questions are still viable even if e.g. a link goes down.
The edits that seem to have triggered your war at first appear to be about improving the wording in the question, yet looking closer at them they also remove whole parts of sentences.
While this might be helping the question you now also start changing it - no matter if intently or inadvertently. At this point the OP steps in and tells you that your changes do modify the question into something they did not originally ask.
Now you start to insist on your changes making the question better and clearer. The OP insists on them making it worse. Looking at the revision history, this has continued for 6 revisions of back and forth. While your changes might be for the better of the question the OP clearly tells you that they do not with you to change it in revision 8:
Rollback to Revision 2 - Stop reverting edits. They are not approriate edits. No means no.
At this point it is time to take a step back. No matter your intentions, the OP does not wish for your help. Even if they would like your help, the back and forth degraded this attempt into, as you called it already, a war, a show of strength & determination.
It is not your question. It is their question. And if they wanted to or not, they started getting protective - again this is a sign for you to step down.
How can you go on?:
- Stop fighting. The rolling back and forth of edits is indirect, there is no proper channel for any of you both to communicate your intents - thus it is happening in the first place
- Now you can either continue your quest to improve the question or accept it and move on. If you choose the latter then you can stop reading here, otherwise:
Get on even ground: The OP has less than 200 rep, you have more than 3.5k rep. This means you have different privileges and powers on this site. Thus the OP might even feel oppressed by you.
- start a chat between you and the OP, discuss your intentions there and find out why they won't see it the way you do. Discussion opens doors. Action closes them.
- flag the question for Mod Attention to get a third party involved. Mods exist to moderate the community, they are here to reconcile between warring parties - always for the best of the site though, not necessarily for the best of you or the OP.
Well, that ended up less simple than I intended. It's also by no means an absolute guide but more of a list of things to think about.