Need to correct and update my contacts' phone numbers

Question

I need to correct and update (or delete) my contacts' telephone number, but there seems to be no place to edit phone numbers or delete them, once they are in the list.
Everything else seems fine, but I cannot delete old/wrong phone numbers.
The Help docs make no mention of editing contacts, strangely.
I am running Skype v5.8.0 on Mac OSX MountainLion. 
 

Answer 1

The matter of contacts is a complicated one. Skype has a number of different contact types (Lync, Facebook, Skype, MSN/MSA, SkypeOut, AddressBook), and unfortunately some of them behave differently.
The thing to know is this: you are not allowed to delete a contact's identity. This is the string or number that Skype uses to uniquely identify a contact. It makes some intuitive sense: you probably wouldn't expect to be able to view your friend's Skype profile and edit their Skype name. At the very least, if this were a limitation, you'd probably understand why that was so.
Phone numbers in Skype work the same way. You can add and delete numbers to your heart's content AS LONG AS: (1) those numbers are not the identity number; (2) the contact type allows it (e.g. not Facebook, Lync, AB); and (3) they were added by you in Skype (not the Address Book).
The situation that seems to be tripping people up in this thread is when you create a contact which has a phone number as its identity. These numbers are called SkypeOut contacts, because they will use the SkypeOut service to call over the PSTN network instead of VOIP. They can be created in the Add Contact page, or by using the little plus button in the History or Conversation views after you’ve already made a call to the number.
Since Skype uses a phone number to refer to these SkypeOut contacts, and to save and recall history about them, you cannot remove that number. Skype wouldn’t know what to call this contact anymore without its identity. This is the behavior that tmcdanel was describing. You can change the number, but deleting it would lead to the contact itself (and all its other numbers and information) being deleted. And that may not what you were after.
So, where does that leave us?
If you have a SkypeOut contact which you want to change the number for, you can Edit the identity and change it. (It wasn’t always so: this feature was released about a year ago.)
If you’ve added other numbers in the meantime and would like one of those to become the identity, you can rotate one of them in by copying the number, deleting it from further down the list and then pasting it into the identity field (the first one in the list on the contact info page).
If you are never going to call this person again, and don’t have a new number for them, then you can delete the contact entirely. Do this by selecting the contact in the Contact List and pressing Delete. This won’t delete the history of calls and SMSes that you’ve made to that number, it will just remove the contact from your contact list. And if you ever you get a new number for them, you can add a new contact with the new number.
What I do personally is try to use SkypeOut contacts sparingly. I always add a number to the person’s Skype contact if I can.
I definitely recognize that this could be much simpler. Unfortunately, I can't provide a timeline for a more unified contact experience. But I thought people would want to know why it works the way it does at present. Hopefully this will give you a clear idea of how to use SkypeOut contacts as they exist today.