Should the amount of possible edit suggestions per day be limited? [duplicate]

Question

As a reviewer noted nicely:

User is editing too much post today. Obviously not interested in content but in reputation

Not exactly a valid rejection reason in general, but said user suggested many edits indeed, and while a few were ok, many merely placed keywords in backticks (which btw should not be done for non-code, e.g. for the reasons listed here) and should have been rejected (a shockingly large amount of these were however approved). This suggestion behaviour is most certainly not what the system is intended for, so I wonder if there is a limit on suggestions in place? Note I'm not referring to the edit-ban due to rejections for seven days but to a general limit of, say, 20 suggestions per day.

As many of you have noted, reviewers actually accepting such crappy suggestions are a problem. But they are not the problem, but rather a consequence. Limiting the amount of edit suggestions¹ limits the source of all evil bad edits, while the serious reviewers are rather the victims who loose the battle against are slower than robo-reviewers and thus more likely to reject a suggestion when it has already been approved. We should educate the editors to "make it count", which to my knowledge is already the desired behaviour, but not in a vague "minimum character count" - one missing backtick edited in may severely improve a post, while a second one to emphasize a non-code keyword is bad.

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¹ And as discussed in comments, 20/day is not necessarily a good measure, something like max. 5 unapproved edits in the last 24 hours where approval a) make another edit available and b) increases that limit with time might be better - the suggestion here is about the consideration of such a limit, not about its implementation details

Answer 1

As Bart stated in the comments, the main problem is that suggested edits are accepted too easily. Which bringst us to another point of attention: what suggested edits should be accepted? In my opinion these suggestions should be accepted:

• Fixed indentation substantially
• Fixed formatting substantially
• Fixed a lot of spelling/grammar mistakes
• Fixed obvious coding mistakes, but shouldn't change the meaning of the code

What are the solutions to reputation farming by editing?

Educate the reviewers

An edit should make the post more readable or clearer. Nothing more. What our culprit does is just adding backticks, __and shouldn't be accepted in the first place__. That is the easiest change. Emphasize that trivial changes shouldn't be accepted.

It still doesn't stop reviewers who review just to get badges. In my opinion, suggested edits are accepted too fast. The reviewers sometimes don't even bother to change obvious typos.

Add a suggestion limit

Should we use a suggestion limit? A suggestion limit of 20 seems too strict. I can suggest twenty good edits. But the culprit has _six_ pages of edits from today, so approximately 90 suggestions.

I propose to use a suggestion limit of 40 a day. If you have a higher number of accepted edits, the limit should be lifted. This would only work if reviewers aren't afraid to reject trivial changes.

Discourage trivial changes

What if (new) users continue to add backticks, even when there aren't needed. Well, notify them that these edits shouldn't be suggested. And with notify, I really mean notify them by a notification, and every time when the user clicks on "edit" a blue popup balloon or something like that comes on. The edit-ban automatically kicks in, because the suggestions were rejected.

Use a rollback script

[In the comments Kobi has linked this person][4]. He has multiple edits that only change one thing: adding the visual-studio tag. I believe this can easily be detected by a script running every day, like the [vote fraud script][5]. Adding tags is a very easy way to farm reputation, and the reviewers, _again_, should reject it. In the case of repeated tag-adding, the pattern could be detected by a script, and the reputation should be taken away from the editor.

Summary

Emphasize (to the editor and reviewer) that trivial changes are unacceptable. Add a suggestion limit of 40 for new users. Lift the limit when the editor behaves well.

Answer 2

I think that this more of a review problem than an editing problem.

If we solve the robo-reviewing problem, the mass editing problem should resolve itself. If enough of these edits are rejected, the editor gets the boot, and the message is sent that suggesting a lot of minor edits isn't really what we're looking for from editors.

Setting a daily limit would slow down the mass editors, but I doubt it would really solve the problem. Rather than seeing 100 minors edits in a single day we would just see 20 per day for 5 days.

If you really want to go after sloppy mass editing, and solving the robo-review problem is really that insurmountable, wouldn't a rate limit be more effective than a daily limit?

If the editor is forced to wait for a full two or three minutes between edits, the chances that the editor will fix more than a single issue increases, if not the chances of the reviewers catching up increases, and hopefully if the reviewers can catch up, the chances of edit rejections putting a stop to the sloppy edits before they've gone too far also increases.

Answer 3

Ok, based on the comment discussions here's a hopefully more sensible limit suggestions:

Grant users a certain amount of N "unapproved edits"-tokens per (rolling) 24 hours, i.e. once they suggest an edit, they have N-1 suggestions left. If their suggestion is accepted, they get that token back, if it's rejected or not reviewed within 24 hours (how likely is that on SO? But I digress...) the token is only returned 24 hours after the suggestion was posted. Once the approved to unapproved ratio (long-time or during the last 24 hours, both should be somehow considered) exceeds (or goes well under) a specific amount, the user gets their N permanently increased (decreased).

To add some numbers:

• Anonymous/unregistered users and [registered ones with < 20 local rep (association bonus doesn't count, just like on protected questions)] start with N=2, which is enough to point out severe flaws while reducing their ability to spam/vandalize/thankyouverymuch
• Registered users with 20-100 rep earned at the respective site start with N=5
• 101-1999: N=10