Opining a successful-edit-count-based two tier suggested edit system

Question

This is a bit of a follow up to the 'answer' here.

From the time editing was first introduced, it's a system that both has been refined, and occasionally has scaled poorly. In general, the mechanics of the network ought to reward good behaviour on its own merits, either tangibly or intangibly.

Our gold badge dupe close system is an example of reputation being separated from a privilege.

The suggested edit system is meant to be 'training wheels' for editing. You make a major edit, someone reviews it and ensures it's up to scratch and approves it. It's a great system since it lets people learn the ropes while avoiding the risk of major vandalism or over-enthusiasm.

On the other hand, it's possible to get what needs editing, and how to do it before you hit 2000 reputation, or to hit 2k reputation and not really have had much editing experience. The exact numbers are up for tweaking of course but here's what I'm roughly suggesting.

Assuming the user has a clean record - and hasn't been suspended from suggesting edits:

• Allow a user to do major edits at 250 successful edits even if the 2k editing ability is not unlocked. We'd still keep a 6 char minimum here to prevent minor/trivial edits. Allowing those as under 6 char edits is something to be considered

• Allow a user full edit rights at 500 successful edits.

I'd tier this based on site size as we already do with 'small' graduated site reputation levels, though I'd say SO might need its own threshold and tweaking.

If a little complication is alright, I'd say a 75% success rate in edits would be a nice thing to have. Alternatively, a high rate of failed edits, or a string of failed ones should also raise an auto-flag for review.

I'd appreciate feedback, and people pointing out any obviously unshielded thermal exhaust ports.

Answer 1

I'm OK with this in spirit.

It splits the editor pool into two - those who earn it through their activity, and those who are rewarded it after hitting 2K reputation.

I don't see this as a bad thing, since someone who's consistently good at doing edits should be rewarded with more privilege to do them.

Answer 2

As Laurel mentioned in the comments, 250 is a long "engine warmup time". On Stack Overflow, it can take long periods of time for a suggested edit to finished getting reviewed (even over a week. see John M. Wright's 2022 Community-A-Thon report and Aaron Bertrand's), and you can only have 5 in the queue at a time.

Quoting Makoto: "someone who's consistently good at doing edits should be rewarded with more privilege to do them.". My proposal for how this can be achieved is here: For edit-suggestors with a streak of N approvals, only require one approval for their next suggested edit. The benefit of a streak mechanism is that you can set a low warmup number (streak size) to give an edit suggestor higher trust knowing that if they show a need for further learning of how to do a good job, that trust level can be immediately lowered (to be regained), pointing them to the Help Center and FAQ pages on how to make good edits. You also wouldn't really have to do much adjustment of the numbers with site size.

Allow a user full edit rights at 500 successful edits.

Something felt a bit off to me about this at first, since that's the exact threshold where you stop getting rep from suggested edits (once you earn 1000 rep from it), and currently, you need to make it the rest of the way to unlock full editing privileges by other means (namely writing useful questions and answers). But after some thought, I can't see a reason why this would be a bad thing. If someone can demonstrate doing a job well done 500 times, I don't see why not trust them with full editing privileges. Even if they go rogue and start vandalizing things, we have the regular mechanisms to detect that: custom mod flags, rollbacks, rollback war detection, and post bumping.

Answer 3

I might have to be the sole dissenter here.

If I recall correctly from not too long ago, I made about 90 or so approved edits before I reached 2k on Stack Overflow. The only thing that I found annoying was that the queue was limited to 500 items at a time, but it wasn't too bad. Before long, I got 2k rep and graduated to full edit privileges. At least on Stack Overflow, 2k isn't an unreasonable barrier.

I don't have any data, but I suspect this happens for most users on Stack Overflow. I don't think that someone would be making a large number of suggested edits but not asking/answering questions. If a user needs 500 approved edits, then they'd already have gotten 1000 reputations from it, so they're not too far off from simply getting the privilege through reputation. Perhaps on a smaller site where 2k is harder to reach, it may happen, but in those cases, I suggest simply lowering the reputation needed for the privilege.

If you really want to give people privileges for good editing, then I suggest bumping the rep rewarded for an approved edit from +2 to +5 and removing the 1000 rep cap for suggested edits. This way users get both the privilege of 400 successful edits and credit towards other moderation-related privileges.