"Trivial edit" checkbox

Question

Every time I see someone use the word "loosing", it makes my insides twist. I thought I'd go on a mini-campaign to correct this spelling (unless I happen across a correct usage, of course). However, someone pointed out that trivial edits are discouraged. I don't think that staving off the mutilation of the English language is all that trivial, but let's concede the point for now.

I, and probably numerous others, want to provide a service to the SO community by fixing up small errors such as this, but I have no way to perform the edit without skewing the natural ranking algorithms for listing interesting questions.

Is this possible to introduce a checkbox during edits labelled something like, Trivial edit (minor typographical or formatting correction), please? Perhaps, by some heuristic, small edits could be denoted trivial by default.

Answer 1

This would be incredibly useful for the new French Language and Usage site. I won't bother citing examples, because it's in private beta and most people wouldn't be able to see it, but French orthography is particular in that spelling conveys a lot of grammatical meaning: for example, "parlé", "parlée", "parlés", and "parlées" are participles that all mean about the same thing and are pronounced the same but convey slightly different grammatical information about the noun they describe. Furthermore, the French language is very rich in homonyms: I'll cite, for example, the case of "c'est", "s'est", "ses", and "ces", all of which mean something completely different but which are pronounced approximately like the English word "say". This is quite common in French.

Thus single-character edits of posts to fix typos and mistakes can vastly improve their readability and linguistic correctness, especially on a language site! The two most important points are the following:

• There already seems to be a consensus on meta.french that editing posts to fix grammatical errors is acceptable, and
• What constitutes a significant edit, counted in number of characters changed is not the same thing in French as it is in English, so it's silly that the rules conceived for an English-speaking site should apply to us.

I see absolutely no reason why we shouldn't be able to settle this on a site-by-site basis based on community consensus. Why should the rules devised for Stack Overflow, which are clearly inadequate for FL&U, apply to us there?

Answer 2

I'd like some kind of trivial edit checkbox only if it meant not bumping the question. That would make sense. But otherwise, trivial just to say trivial? nah...

Answer 3

As the FAQ says, SE relies on some stuff typical for wikis. By allowing edits for questions and answers, noise, lengthy discussions and flame wars happen not as often.

As an encouragement for edits, a question is even put at the top of the front page after an edit ("bumping").

So far, so great.

However, Some users (including me) seem to enjoy improving their answers after first posting them, sometimes even with minor stuff like spelling fixes. It so happens that the question returns to the top of the front page a lot, and it seems like this gets interpreted as: "There's a user who just keeps editing to gain front-page attention." As a penalty, Qs or As with many (> 10?) edits automatically become community wiki (CW), preventing the original owner from gaining rep through said questions or answers.

Just to make it clear: I don't care a lot about reputation.

But: I enjoy editing and improving stuff I come across, and I, as a non-native English speaker, often find that things I've written in my own Qs or As are ambiguous or more complicated than they need be. This is enough reason for me to edit things frequently, and I believe it helps this site's long-term quality of content. Editing, after all, is encouraged on SE.

What I don't want is a lot of extra attention to all the smallish, minor edits I do.

Thus, I am all in favor for the featrue request: Please add a checkbox below the "Edit Summary", called "This is a minor edit".

• Checking this box should prevent the question from being bumped to the top of the list, and it should not increase the counter that causes the Q or A to become CW.

• Checking this box should not affect the edit history because we don't want to hide damage done by trolls.

On most wikis, it looks a lot like this:   

When you browse the list of recent changes, you can decide whether you want to see changes including minor edits or not. I understand that on SE, a lot is done to not clutter the pages with too many options - one solution might be to have high-rep users (maybe 2k and up) decide if they still want to have minor edits on the front page or not.

One of many examples why this would be useful: This answer on EE.SE, including the comments below it.

Answer 4

I just asked for the same feature at miniedit facility and was pointed to this posting. So let me reprint my statement here:

It would be nice if there were a possibility to edit questions or answers for misprints and other tiny changes without flushing them to the top of the list. I often notice later such blemishes of otherwise good answers or questions of mine (and others).

I therefore propose to add a miniedit button where one can make small changes to a question or answer, limited to changes of 20 characters or so, without affecting the timestamp responsible for the ordering of the questions.

Answer 5

How is:

Trivial edit (minor typographical or formatting correction)?

Better than:

Added 1 character in body

I do not think we are losing anything by not implementing this.

Additionally, usually posts have way more that a single letter wrong, we prefer bigger edits.