Is there an actual "accept ALL the suggested edits" problem?

Question

One common complaint on MSO about suggested edits is that some users blindly accept all suggested edits, no matter how minor or incorrect they may be. It seems to come up especially frequently in the never-ending "is a minor edit better than no edit at all" debate.

It reminds me of the complaint we had two years ago about how some users would automatically upvote any post with a score of less than zero because they disliked seeing negative numbers or considered downvoting inappropriate. Jeff ended those "pity/sympathy upvote" complaints — more or less — by asking Is there an actual "pity" or "sympathy" upvote problem? and posting some data in an answer.

Can we get similar data on suggested edit approvals? I don't spend that much time on the /review pages, but I rarely see descriptions like

Username approved n edit suggestions, and rejected 0 edit suggestions.

and when I do, it's usually because the reviewer is new (i.e. values of n less than, say, ten).

Answer 1

Since all suggested edit approval/reject are public they are also in the Data.Se in the table SuggestedEditVotes.

I figured that if there's a problem with rubber stamping edits it would show when people are accepting/rejecting edits faster that the allowable time to upvote two comments (5 seconds).

So I wrote a query that compares each vote with the one prior. Then I counted the number of times per user they voted twice within 5 seconds.

I've apparently done it 5 times and you've done it 29 times.

Here are the top 32.

User                        UserId  # Of times 2 votes were separated by 5 seconds
Book Of Zeus                905093  2253 
marc_s                      13302   1535 
Oded                        1583    1490 
Haim Evgi                   74314   1253 
Zsolt Botykai               11621   1183 
JB King                     8745    1000 
warren                      4418    995  
Lucifer                     996493  943  
abatishchev                 41956   925  
Bill the Lizard             1288    843  
Uwe Keim                    107625  831  
DVK                         119280  781  
Cody Gray                   366904  725  
pratap k                    899271  670  
Gilles                      387076  636  
Nick Craver                 13249   613  
mKorbel                     714968  530  
Matt                        444991  513  
animuson                    246246  506  
Sean Owen                   64174   471  
balexandre                  28004   469  
Davide Piras                559144  467  
Abdel Olakara               185655  458  
yojimbo87                   217288  447  
???                         596219  402  
bpeterson76                 364708  395  
Alex K.                     246342  379  
OMG Ponies                  135152  366  
Srikar                      147019  356  
0A0D                        195488  346  
Stecya                      606586  339  
Jeff Atwood                 1       328  

Yikes that's a lot of familiar names and a lot of very fast approval/rejections.

Using a later revision of this query I was able to use look for examples where a user did a large # of these quick votes in a single day.

Using that as input for this query through sheer trial an error able to find these Edit votes.

41 Accepts between 2012-03-01 00:29:13 and 2012-03-01 00:30:36. Or 1 accept for every 1.8 seconds.

   userid VoteTime            suggestededitid Vote
-- ------ ------------------- --------------- ----- 
1  905093 2012-03-01 00:29:13 211813          UpMod 
2  905093 2012-03-01 00:29:14 211812          UpMod 
3  905093 2012-03-01 00:29:16 211809          UpMod 
4  905093 2012-03-01 00:29:16 211808          UpMod 
5  905093 2012-03-01 00:29:17 211807          UpMod 
6  905093 2012-03-01 00:29:19 211796          UpMod 
7  905093 2012-03-01 00:29:25 211855          UpMod 
8  905093 2012-03-01 00:29:26 211854          UpMod 
9  905093 2012-03-01 00:29:28 211850          UpMod 
10 905093 2012-03-01 00:29:31 211846          UpMod 
11 905093 2012-03-01 00:29:36 211844          UpMod 
12 905093 2012-03-01 00:29:37 211843          UpMod 
13 905093 2012-03-01 00:29:39 211841          UpMod 
14 905093 2012-03-01 00:29:41 211840          UpMod 
15 905093 2012-03-01 00:29:44 211836          UpMod 
16 905093 2012-03-01 00:29:46 211839          UpMod 
17 905093 2012-03-01 00:29:46 211835          UpMod 
18 905093 2012-03-01 00:29:49 211834          UpMod 
19 905093 2012-03-01 00:29:50 211833          UpMod 
20 905093 2012-03-01 00:29:52 211832          UpMod 
21 905093 2012-03-01 00:29:55 211828          UpMod 
22 905093 2012-03-01 00:29:57 211826          UpMod 
23 905093 2012-03-01 00:29:59 211788          UpMod 
24 905093 2012-03-01 00:30:00 211792          UpMod 
25 905093 2012-03-01 00:30:01 211793          UpMod 
26 905093 2012-03-01 00:30:03 211785          UpMod 
27 905093 2012-03-01 00:30:06 211777          UpMod 
28 905093 2012-03-01 00:30:09 211687          UpMod 
29 905093 2012-03-01 00:30:23 211665          UpMod 
30 905093 2012-03-01 00:30:24 211663          UpMod 
31 905093 2012-03-01 00:30:25 211662          UpMod 
32 905093 2012-03-01 00:30:27 211766          UpMod 
33 905093 2012-03-01 00:30:28 211746          UpMod 
34 905093 2012-03-01 00:30:29 211623          UpMod 
35 905093 2012-03-01 00:30:30 211688          UpMod 
36 905093 2012-03-01 00:30:31 211667          UpMod 
37 905093 2012-03-01 00:30:31 211790          UpMod 
38 905093 2012-03-01 00:30:33 211616          UpMod 
39 905093 2012-03-01 00:30:34 211615          UpMod 
40 905093 2012-03-01 00:30:35 211872          UpMod 
41 905093 2012-03-01 00:30:36 211871          UpMod 

I'm sure you could find other examples or examples where for a given time period users rubber stamped all available suggested edits (they're in the table too).