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Imagine this scenario (this has happened to me, but I can't find any examples ATM):

I come across a post that needs editing, for whatever reason, and make necessary changes to it. After submitting my edit, I notice that there is a pending edit that duplicates the changes that I just made (or makes some of the changes, but not others).

Should the pending edit be rejected? I'm often hesitant to reject it because that will reflect negatively on the editor, even though its a perfectly valid edit that just happens to duplicate what I already did (or overwrite some of my changes, through no fault of the editor, since we submitted the edits at the same time.)

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    Don't be afraid to reject - nobody should take this personally.. Mar 29, 2011 at 23:07

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There is not penalty for having an edit rejected, there is only a reward for getting it approved. So if the edit is rejected nobody is harmed by that.

The question then is, if that edit deserves a special reward and should be approved for that reason.

If the action in question would be answering instead of editing, the scenario would be that someone answered a question only to find that somebody else had already give an identical answer a bit earlier. Usually the answerer can't expect many upvotes for posting that duplicate answer, in fact it is good form to delete this duplicate answer if it doesn't add anything.

So despite answers being the most important part of the site, posting of duplicate answers isn't generally considered to be worth any reward. Therefore posting duplicate edits surely also shouldn't be worth any rewards and there is no reason to accept edits just to give out rewards if they don't add anything useful.

The side effect is that it's better to fix posts faster that slower, if you want reputation for it. And that's a good thing.

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