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When I'm going through the suggested edits review queue, I often notice suggested edits to terrible questions (for example, https://stackoverflow.com/suggested-edits/237360).

How should I handle these suggested edits? Should I approve them if they are reasonable? Or should I reject them even if they are good to discourage people from spending their time on such low quality questions?

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    I want to bring attention to that editor in that suggestion you linked... in the past few days that I've been going back to monitor the suggested edits, he has made a lot of pointless tag additions to many questions. It's like he sees one key word in there and he thinks that the corresponding tag should be added. (e.g., templates, database, assignment-operator...) I hope I hope I hope nobody is actually accepting his suggestions.
    – Jeff Mercado
    Commented Apr 10, 2012 at 5:27
  • @Jeff: A lot of them are getting accepted. :/ I just cast the second reject vote on the two I saw that were still open.
    – jscs
    Commented Apr 10, 2012 at 6:33
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    You can always accept, then leave a comment on the question (you can @user anyone who edited the post) to the effect "next time, please consider the entire question when editing to improve."
    – user1228
    Commented Apr 10, 2012 at 14:52

2 Answers 2

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Retagging a closed question? Yeah... that'll help...

I can't say there's a standard for what a "terrible" question is, but a closed question has been determined to be of poor quality by the community, and simply retagging it is not going to revive it. So yes, that edit is too minor by any standard. Closed questions should be held to a higher standard because, well, they're closed. They need a lot more improvement in order to make it as a real question and be reopened. Changing the tags won't do that.

This question likely never will be reopened, so any edit to it would probably be rejected as it would be a useless and feeble attempt. I would only approve a simple retag of a closed question if it was removing a tag in order to kill it off.

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  • FWIW, the question wasn't closed at the time I first saw the the suggested edit (although it was one vote closer after I saw it ;) )
    – David Wolever
    Commented Apr 10, 2012 at 5:03
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    @David: In that case, use your judgement. That example is a pretty clear-cut case that it's going to get closed, but I suppose there could be some that are harder to tell. Honestly, it's a very case-by-case basis. Like I said, there's no great standard. I'd say explain your reasoning more clearly with a custom rejection reason, but not everyone always reads those prior to blindly approving things.
    – animuson StaffMod
    Commented Apr 10, 2012 at 5:05
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In my opinion edit must be approved only if they help in improvement of question correctly. One case I observed in this concern is a question which I cannot edit due to edit queue. I bookmarked it and seen that users are not exactly correcting it they are editing minor errors and leaving the big mistakes of question.

So in this kind of cases these minor edits have to be rejected of those user which only editing for 2 reputation and not concern with the improvement of question and leaving the big mistake of question as it is.

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