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While editing this question to include a better title, I noticed that the body of the text had a stray lowercase i, and went to change it.

The error came back that my edit was too short (less than 6 characters). I was momentarily confused, because the title was all-new and plenty long, and then figured out it meant in the body. Could/should we either count title changes toward the minimum character change count or just mention that the error refers to the body of the question?

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5 Answers 5

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This has been implemented and will be deployed soon.

Suggested edits that improve a question's title will allow any length body edits, as well.

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  • I just hope users will not start to change the title just to be able to add a comma in the question's body.
    – avpaderno
    Commented Apr 30, 2012 at 1:47
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    Probably not and if they do, just reject the suggested edit. Maybe we add some special animation for these type of rejections :)
    – Jarrod Dixon
    Commented Apr 30, 2012 at 4:25
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Yeah, this seems utterly wrong: your edit to the title was plenty significant enough all on its own; at that point, minor body edits could be a cherry on top.

Given the importance of having a good title, I don't see any good reason why a major title edit shouldn't allow minor body edits to ride along as well. Especially considering you can submit the title edits alone and then someone else could submit slightly more involved body edits, thus requiring two separate approvals anyway...

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I just ran into the same problem Travel.SE. Definitely think the title edits should count toward the limit.

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Yes, the current behavior is not right. I now can either edit only the title (what I originally wanted), or really change the wording of the question, just to be able to fix some typo.

My latest example on tex.stackexchange.com: I wanted to only change the title, but I then saw the to instead of do. Since I could not change only this, I had to change all three "do" to "can", which is arguably not really an improvement.

The idea to "not have someone approve an edit if it is only tiny" is a good one, but when I edit the title, someone has to approve it anyway.

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Just ran into this problem again on Programmers (ran into it many times on StackOverflow when I was <2k).

It's fairly common to have a well-written (or decently-written) question with a misleading/inaccurate title, or a title that is filled with all of the question's tags. Sometimes the user doesn't know how to articulate their problem in title form. Fixing just the title is sufficient, but if there are minor typos in the body, they need to be left there.

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