Reject or approve suggested edits for "removed clutter"?

Question

There have been many suggested edits with the sole purpose of removing expressions like:

• Thank you.
• Thanks in advance
• Thank you, Sean

and so on, while many other aspects of the question are left without any intervention.

I noticed in the past days that this type of suggested edit was justified as:

removed clutter

and started to pay a little more attention to the user suggesting it. After a while I've realized that it was the same user over and over just removing "Thanks" from questions.

It is my understanding that removing one or two words with no meaningful implication on the question itself is considered "too minor" an edit:

This edit is too minor; suggested edits should be substantive improvements addressing multiple issues in the post.

But on the other hand, after viewing the user's profile, I've noticed that many of these removed clutter edits have been approved.

So, my question is:

Is this appropriate? Should I be approving them? Because I've been rejecting them.

Answer 1

Anyone can do a search for "thanks" and find thousands of posts to edit on Stack Overflow. This sounds like a rep grab, so if that's all they're going to improve on a post that needs other edits, I'd deny them the two points by either rejecting the edit outright or (preferably) hitting "improve" and unchecking the "helpful" box.

Note that "thanks" and other signatures are considered clutter, so it is a valid reason to edit a post. If that's the only thing that needs to be changed to make the post better, go ahead and approve the edit. But reviewing edits is supposed to teach people the right way to edit. If someone is being lazy and not making other obvious improvements to a post, let them know that they're doing it wrong.