Has this ever been considered?: Upvoting/Downvoting edits

Question

I scoured meta and have not found any discussion on this topic.

I thought about it when I very much appreciated an edit someone made https://askubuntu.com/revisions/146161/2 which greatly clarified my original title https://askubuntu.com/posts/146161/revisions

And then realized I often would have upvoted edits in the past as well, I don't see downvoting as being so useful though because you can really just roll back or re-edit if it is that bad. So, downvoting becomes a little convoluted.

But, I do think, allowing an upvote/downvote next to each edit may:

1. Encourage good edits

2. Encourage more incentive to make edits

3. Discourage bad/careless edits

All in all, I feel it may be useful. Not so much a feature request as wanting to understand why it doesn't exist. Any thoughts ?

Answer 1

It's really not necessary. Sure, occasionally I run across some edits and I want to throw upvotes at the screen, but that is quite a rare occasion at that. You've already mentioned why we shouldn't have downvoting on them, so I'll skip that.

Why can't we offer reputation?

Editing is meant to improve the post. Edits made on non-community-wiki posts are not meant to actually change the content of the post, but just to make the post more readable and more understandable. Fixing it up to be more useful is the goal here. The vast majority of the time, you're not actually introducing new content to the post, and the vast majority of the time an edit doesn't deserve reputation (those under 2,000 are granted the +2 to help them gain editing privileges). This is a community-driven site; those who care about the content will pitch in because they want to make the site better.

What about comment-style voting?

Adding comment-style upvotes to edits doesn't achieve anything. You can't order edits by popularity of votes because edits need to be sorted chronologically in order for them to make any sense. Each edit is directly correlated to the edit previous to it. This is not always the case with comments, where certain key comments can be upvoted above the rest and still make sense without the previous context behind them. They'd just be random votes on edits.

I'm all for encouraging people to make good edits, but useless votes that they likely won't ever look at doesn't seem like the correct route.

Would it be visible?

Not a lot of people look at the edit history anyways. Unless you have a specific reason to look, chances are you won't. This would likely end up being some hidden feature behind the scenes that a lot of people won't use.

Answer 2

It's Community

There are +2 given for people who are suggesting edits and being reviewed. Not necessity to give more incentives to other people having edit permission.

See

1. Edit a question (from other user) and get +2 rep?

2. Not getting edit's +2 rep after reaching 2k rep

3. Discourage bad/careless edits being feature requested.

Answer 3

While I'm not sure, my hunch is that animuson♦'s answer might have in mind the "technology" sites (it was composed in June 2012, after all -- what was the spread of the SE network at that point?).

My further sense is that something like this would be valuable on the non-technology SE sites where answers may well develop over time, as new ideas (or even evidence in some cases) come to light. I have returned to posts of my own and added material that have roughly doubled the content as compared to the previous "draft", and I have seen others do the same.

I could envisage a metric (say, where a revision adds 33% to the volume of a post > n characters) which could be "upticked" much in the way comments are, and that would deliver some rep to the reviser (say, +2 much like low-rep edits accrue).

This would meet the case then when the following conditions are satisfied:

• user has already UV'ed a post (of > n characters); when
• that post is substantially extended (i.e., improved) by adding ~ 33% of n to its content;
• user can now UT ("up tick") ;) the revision, to award +2 (or whatever -- maybe even +5!) to the reviser in recognition of the contribution.

It would encourage (somewhat) such further drafts, and all this would help to make the web an even better place. (Yes, I can see how it might be "gamed", but that's the case for just about everything in this ecosystem!)

Well ... it's a thought.