Requesting a "Stop Polishing Turds" Edit Suggestion Reject Reason

Question

TL;DR

Whenever I work through the Suggested Edits Review Queue, I find edits on questions that should be closed instead of bothering to edit them. I would like to have a new edit reject reason similar to this:

Post should be flagged
This question or answer is either off-topic or of low enough quality that it should be flagged for closure or deletion instead of being edited.

Note: I know this could be worded more succinctly, but I'm not much of a wordsmith. I'll leave that to the UI experts.

Details

This is sort of a follow-up to a previous request of mine: Add a "Reject and Flag Original Post" button to Suggested Edit Review Queue Interface. In that post, I suggested adding an option to reject an edit and flag the original post in with one button. I agree with Shog9's response to that request, which is essentially, "Reviewing edits is hard enough. We want reviewers to focus on the edit rather than the original post, and we don't really need another button cluttering up the interface". His suggestion was to reject edits with the "No improvement whatsoever" reason, then go flag the original post.

I have used that suggestion for a while now, and while it works for individual posts, it does nothing to prevent future edits to close-worthy posts. I would like a standard way to say to the editor, "Stop wasting your time and the time of reviewers on something that should just be closed." I agree that suggested edit reviewers should focus on the edits rather than the original post, but sometimes edits are on questions that are so unambiguously off-topic or terrible, that I can't help but see that it should be closed. I would like a more clear way to communicate that to them.

I think this would actually be helpful to new Stack Exchange users that make edits that really do clean up formatting, grammar, and spelling, but do it on posts that they don't realize should just be closed. If I were a new user and saw the reject reason of "No improvement whatsoever" when the post is clearly better formatted after my work, I would be confused and annoyed.

Examples

https://stackoverflow.com/review/suggested-edits/8263364
https://stackoverflow.com/review/suggested-edits/8730521
https://stackoverflow.com/review/suggested-edits/8374080
https://stackoverflow.com/review/suggested-edits/7067805
https://stackoverflow.com/review/suggested-edits/6997529

Answer 1

I really wanted this reason too; last fall when we revamped the edit decline reasons, pointless edits on doomed posts showed up repeatedly as a problem in the discussion and in my own analysis of edits.

The problem is that it's even harder to nail down the criteria for "turd-polishing" than for "too minor"; everyone agrees that editing blatant spam is a waste of time, but when it comes to less severe problems things get dicey in a hurry: is an edit that fixes code formatting in a debugging question turd-polishing? What about a cleanup edit to an off-topic post where the editor is also flagging for a moderator to migrate it to a more appropriate site?

To evaluate these properly, you'd have to take into account a LOT of context sometimes, context that doesn't even obviously exist when you're looking at the post in review. I don't want to discourage anyone from doing this if they're motivated to do so... But encouraging it (or even providing the tools to do it properly) is, I suspect, an undertaking whose effort greatly outweighs the potential benefit (if any).

Keep in mind, there's already a disincentive of sorts to doing this: if the post you're editing gets deleted, you lose the token amount of reputation you earned for the edit. Therefore, I feel that the real solution here - as usual - is more deletion.

Answer 2

I disagree with Shog here; I think there's a clear line to be drawn, no more ambiguous than the one we already draw for close votes:

IF the reviewer thinks the question should be closed as it stands AND the suggested edit doesn't change that fact, THEN the suggestion is a waste of time and should be rejected.

Now, describing it this way does put it pretty solidly in the "No improvement" bin, but people still could take issue because of "whatsoever". I agree with you that it would be valuable to be even more explicit in the review and say very clearly "If you can't upgrade this to be un-close-worthy, don't bother".

Answer 3

I couldn't disagree with this more.

There is a good reason that closure initially places a question "on hold" — it is because we want people to fix the content, not simply nuke it from oblivion without a second thought.

Guess how fixing the content occurs? Yes, that's right: by editing it.

Who cares if the first edit doesn't solve every single problem with the post? We are literally telling the entire world, by "closing" a question, that we expect people to come along and improve it through edits, such that it becomes worthy of re-opening. But now you want to instead punish those same people with edit rejections and tell them off with disgusting language to "stop polishing turds"?

Ridiculous.