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I've seen a stream of bad suggested edits recently: they don't improve anything but screw up the formatting. (Examples: 1, 2, 3. Note: if you approved one of these, do feel called out. If you're the editor, stop making messes all over.) This isn't a very common occurrence, but the workflow for handling them is pretty bad.

First, there's a social problem: I see many of these edits have been approved. So I'm calling to reviewers:

Don't mindlessly approve stuff just because the change summary is “improve formatting”. Make sure that the edit does, in fact, improve the formatting.

Second, there's a technical problem: most of these suggested edits were performed on posts that required improvement. But the suggested edit caused more harm than good (there's one particular user at the moment who likes to take things that should be code blocks because line breaks are significant, and perform word wrap, which makes the paragraph irrecoverable). So to fix these edits, I've ended up browsing the source of the original version and copying and pasting that into the Improve box.

There was a call earlier for a “Reject and improve” button, which was partially implemented: now a reviewer can mark the suggested edit as “not helpful”. But the implementation is flawed: when improving, we're still going from the post-suggested-edit state of the post.

As Bill the Lizard points out, if the post had already been edited before, there is a menu at the top of the improvement dialog from which the reviewer can choose prior versions to edit from. Sadly this menu does not appear if the suggested edit was on the first revision of the post.

Please provide a simple way to edit a post with a suggested edit, starting from the pre-edit state of the post, even when the post has never been edited.

I've seen a stream of bad suggested edits recently: they don't improve anything but screw up the formatting. (Examples: 1, 2, 3. Note: if you approved one of these, do feel called out. If you're the editor, stop making messes all over.) This isn't a very common occurrence, but the workflow for handling them is pretty bad.

First, there's a social problem: I see many of these edits have been approved. So I'm calling to reviewers:

Don't mindlessly approve stuff just because the change summary is “improve formatting”. Make sure that the edit does, in fact, improve the formatting.

Second, there's a technical problem: most of these suggested edits were performed on posts that required improvement. But the suggested edit caused more harm than good (there's one particular user at the moment who likes to take things that should be code blocks because line breaks are significant, and perform word wrap, which makes the paragraph irrecoverable). So to fix these edits, I've ended up browsing the source of the original version and copying and pasting that into the Improve box.

There was a call earlier for a “Reject and improve” button, which was partially implemented: now a reviewer can mark the suggested edit as “not helpful”. But the implementation is flawed: when improving, we're still going from the post-suggested-edit state of the post.

As Bill the Lizard points out, if the post had already been edited before, there is a menu at the top of the improvement dialog from which the reviewer can choose prior versions to edit from. Sadly this menu does not appear if the suggested edit was on the first revision of the post.

Please provide a simple way to edit a post with a suggested edit, starting from the pre-edit state of the post, even when the post has never been edited.

I've seen a stream of bad suggested edits recently: they don't improve anything but screw up the formatting. (Examples: 1, 2, 3. Note: if you approved one of these, do feel called out. If you're the editor, stop making messes all over.) This isn't a very common occurrence, but the workflow for handling them is pretty bad.

First, there's a social problem: I see many of these edits have been approved. So I'm calling to reviewers:

Don't mindlessly approve stuff just because the change summary is “improve formatting”. Make sure that the edit does, in fact, improve the formatting.

Second, there's a technical problem: most of these suggested edits were performed on posts that required improvement. But the suggested edit caused more harm than good (there's one particular user at the moment who likes to take things that should be code blocks because line breaks are significant, and perform word wrap, which makes the paragraph irrecoverable). So to fix these edits, I've ended up browsing the source of the original version and copying and pasting that into the Improve box.

There was a call earlier for a “Reject and improve” button, which was partially implemented: now a reviewer can mark the suggested edit as “not helpful”. But the implementation is flawed: when improving, we're still going from the post-suggested-edit state of the post.

As Bill the Lizard points out, if the post had already been edited before, there is a menu at the top of the improvement dialog from which the reviewer can choose prior versions to edit from. Sadly this menu does not appear if the suggested edit was on the first revision of the post.

Please provide a simple way to edit a post with a suggested edit, starting from the pre-edit state of the post, even when the post has never been edited.

I've seen a stream of bad suggested edits recently: they don't improve anything but screw up the formatting. (Examples: 1, 2, 3. Note: if you approved one of these, do feel called out. If you're the editor, stop making messes all over.) This isn't a very common occurrence, but the workflow for handling them is pretty bad.

First, there's a social problem: I see many of these edits have been approved. So I'm calling to reviewers:

Don't mindlessly approve stuff just because the change summary is “improve formatting”. Make sure that the edit does, in fact, improve the formatting.

Second, there's a technical problem: most of these suggested edits were performed on posts that required improvement. But the suggested edit caused more harm than good (there's one particular user at the moment who likes to take things that should be code blocks because line breaks are significant, and perform word wrap, which makes the paragraph irrecoverable). So to fix these edits, I've ended up browsing the source of the original version and copying and pasting that into the Improve box.

There was a call earlier for a “Reject and improve” button, which was partially implemented: now a reviewer can mark the suggested edit as “not helpful”. But the implementation is flawed: when improving, we're still going from the post-suggested-edit state of the post.

As Bill the Lizard points out, if the post had already been edited before, there is a menu at the top of the improvement dialog from which the reviewer can choose prior versions to edit from. Sadly this menu does not appear if the suggested edit was on the first revision of the post.

Please provide a simple way to edit a post with a suggested edit, starting from the pre-edit state of the post, even when the post has never been edited.

I've seen a stream of bad suggested edits recently: they don't improve anything but screw up the formatting. (Examples: 1, 2, 3. Note: if you approved one of these, do feel called out. If you're the editor, stop making messes all over.) This isn't a very common occurrence, but the workflow for handling them is pretty bad.

First, there's a social problem: I see many of these edits have been approved. So I'm calling to reviewers:

Don't mindlessly approve stuff just because the change summary is “improve formatting”. Make sure that the edit does, in fact, improve the formatting.

Second, there's a technical problem: most of these suggested edits were performed on posts that required improvement. But the suggested edit caused more harm than good (there's one particular user at the moment who likes to take things that should be code blocks because line breaks are significant, and perform word wrap, which makes the paragraph irrecoverable). So to fix these edits, I've ended up browsing the source of the original version and copying and pasting that into the Improve box.

There was a call earlier for a “Reject and improve” button, which was partially implemented: now a reviewer can mark the suggested edit as “not helpful”. But the implementation is flawed: when improving, we're still going from the post-suggested-edit state of the post.

As Bill the Lizard points out, if the post had already been edited before, there is a menu at the top of the improvement dialog from which the reviewer can choose prior versions to edit from. Sadly this menu does not appear if the suggested edit was on the first revision of the post.

Please provide a simple way to edit a post with a suggested edit, starting from the pre-edit state of the post, even when the post has never been edited.

I've seen a stream of bad suggested edits recently: they don't improve anything but screw up the formatting. (Examples: 1, 2, 3. Note: if you approved one of these, do feel called out. If you're the editor, stop making messes all over.) This isn't a very common occurrence, but the workflow for handling them is pretty bad.

First, there's a social problem: I see many of these edits have been approved. So I'm calling to reviewers:

Don't mindlessly approve stuff just because the change summary is “improve formatting”. Make sure that the edit does, in fact, improve the formatting.

Second, there's a technical problem: most of these suggested edits were performed on posts that required improvement. But the suggested edit caused more harm than good (there's one particular user at the moment who likes to take things that should be code blocks because line breaks are significant, and perform word wrap, which makes the paragraph irrecoverable). So to fix these edits, I've ended up browsing the source of the original version and copying and pasting that into the Improve box.

There was a call earlier for a “Reject and improve” button, which was partially implemented: now a reviewer can mark the suggested edit as “not helpful”. But the implementation is flawed: when improving, we're still going from the post-suggested-edit state of the post.

As Bill the Lizard points out, if the post had already been edited before, there is a menu at the top of the improvement dialog from which the reviewer can choose prior versions to edit from. Sadly this menu does not appear if the suggested edit was on the first revision of the post.

Please provide a simple way to edit a post with a suggested edit, starting from the pre-edit state of the post, even when the post has never been edited.