Approve as too minor

Question

This is going to be pretty short and somewhat to the point. I have a big problem with what goes on in the suggested edits section of /review. Obviously there is a lot of mindless approval going on, but I think that the other big problem here is the massive amount of "too minor" edits that are slipping through.

The argument has already been made that these edits still benefit the site, which of course is true. But, a lot of them technically are still too minor.

I propose a simple little "minor" check box next to the approve button that allows us to approve a minor edit but with a diminished reward the the editor. (1 or 0 rep for approval) I can't be the only one who's getting sick of having to reject people all day.

A couple more good examples of what @Bo Persson is talking about:

• https://stackoverflow.com/review/suggested-edits/769998
• https://stackoverflow.com/review/suggested-edits/769827
• https://stackoverflow.com/review/suggested-edits/769821

Answer 1

There are a couple of problems with this:

1. The meaning of "too minor" varies widely between individuals. Are trivial changes always too minor, or only too minor when they ignore other, more damning problems with the post? The edits you provide as examples illustrate this nicely - even the last one isn't problematic so much because it's minor but rather because it introduces more problems than it fixes!

2. Implemented as you describe, it's nothing more than a rep-denial mechanism. "I like your edit, but not enough to reward you for making it". There's no way to enforce its use in cases that actually justify it, meaning the actual application is likely to be seen as capricious. See also #1...

Note that there's an existing facility for preserving edits while marking them as "rejected": a checkbox on the "Improve" page. However, this suffers from both of the problems noted above and has the additional problem of edits being approved while a reviewer is improving them!

Fortunately, all of these problems can be solved... Here's my solution:

1. Prevent pending edits from being reviewed by more than one reviewer at a time. This is impossible to implement perfectly, but it is possible to hold reviews for a short period of time after one reviewer has started reviewing, thus ensuring that reviewers have a little bit of time to evaluate edits without being sniped by other, faster reviewers. status-completed see here.

2. Replace the "Improve" button with a new "More changes needed..." button. This will produce a pop-up menu with two options:

   • Approve suggestion then edit will open the editor with the suggested revision, behaving as the current Improve does but lacks a checkbox. Submitting the edit approves the suggestion.

   • Discard suggestion then edit will open the editor with the current revision, implicitly rejecting the suggested edit with the following reason:

     Your edit did not correct critical issues with the post - view the revision history to see what should have been changed.

     A link to the revision history should be provided if possible.

     status-completed with this UI:

     

3. Get rid of the "too minor" reject reason entirely. If it's really too minor, reviewers should demonstrate that by providing a not-minor edit. If the reviewer opts to build upon the edit instead of starting over from the current revision, then it isn't too minor! status-completed.

Answer 2

Minor edits (that only include positive changes) should be approved but with no rewards given, and possibly, all edits should be considered minor unless otherwise stated (by the reviewers). I have never subscribed to the idea of edits being too minor because it leads to subjective review decisions (some reviewers are understandably more lenient than others even though rejecting minor edits is generally a safe decision to make, given the current policy).

This will solve the following issues:

1. time wasted for deliberating whether minor edits are too minor.
2. time wasted for improving minor edits so that they are no longer minor
3. pple losing sleep over minor edits being too rewarding
4. helpful edits being rejected for being too minor

Answer 3

This proposal assumes that getting free, quick rep is the goal of people who suggest minor edits. (Otherwise, reducing the rep reward wouldn't be an effective solution.) Let's say that we do reduce the reward all the way down to zero, not just one.

That wouldn't solve the problem, because people would still get the regular two-rep reward from reviewers who didn't use the "too minor" checkbox. We wouldn't actually be getting rid of the rep incentive at all; we'd only be reducing the probability of receiving rep for any given suggestion. If anything, it'll make the problem worse, as people start to submit a higher volume of suggestions to compensate for the reduced probability of reward per suggestion, and individual suggestions get even worse because the suggesters don't want to increase the amount of time they spend on rep farming.

Getting away from the rep argument, this would also teach people that submitting minor edits, while not ideal, is still acceptable. That seems contrary to the usual goal of getting people to fix all the problems in the posts they edit.

Answer 4

I already mentioned this idea in a previous discussion. So I'm in favor.

With any minor edit, I try to save the effort by adding some extra edits, but it isn't always possible. And there are still a lot of posts needing good edits so anyone who wants to earn their 500 times 2 rep have all the possibilities in the world.

// Private rant space: Then again, there are still a lot of bad edit suggestions. (adding thank you, change I to i to mention a few)