During the past few weeks I've noticed some really strange edit suggestions popping up in the edit review queue. They happen in the following conditions:
- The original post has plenty of grammar and spelling errors. Some helpful soul edits it and fixes them with a perfectly fine and valid edit.
- And then a suggestion from pops up in the edit queue from someone else: to undo all of the edit changes and re-introduce all the grammar/spelling errors. But this second edit fixes something minor like changing a tag or a bit of indention.
I'm pretty sure this is a race condition: two people are editing the same post at once, where the good, careful editor (paradoxically) finishes before the sloppy editor.
As an edit reviewer there is nothing you can do but to reject the second edit, even though the second edit may be valid. (An edit can be valid even if it doesn't fix every single problem.)
It may just be me imagining things, but I think this problem has appeared recently. It might suggest some kind of bug in the site. Were there some silent changes in the edit system recently? Or possibly in the edit review queue system?
And whether this is a bug or not, the edit system desperately needs a mutex! Two people shouldn't be able to edit the same post at once. It is incredibly annoying to finishing your major edit, only to find out that someone's been doing some minor fiddling with the post in-between.
