How to discourage edits which change the OP's writing style and add little or nothing to question clarity?

Question

I sometimes look at the edit history of a question, mostly when something smells "off" in the way it is written. I took a look at the history of this question and it seems like the editor has "writer's envy": the edits do little more than rephrase (poorly in my opinion: how do you "hover a user's question"?) what has already been clearly asked.

Is this a misunderstanding of the purpose of editing on the editor's part? Hubris? Rep whoring? Something else?

Am I just being picky here? It bugs me because I respect an individual's writing "voice" and edits merely for style seem a violation of that. SO/SE isn't about literature per se and so long as the writing is clear, without any glaring grammatical errors, what is the point of making these kind of edits?

In my arbitrary sampling of edits I've seen many instances of this – even one edit which replaced all the contractions (e.g. "I am" for "I'm") – because I guess the editor didn't like contractions. Don't like my use of an "em dash" in the last sentence? Fine, but don't you have better things to do?

Answer 1

Personally, I do a lot of editing for style, but IMO it's always sorely needed. There's a lot of barely comprehensible English on SE, and I think an easily readable question attracts more/better answers.

Looking at the example you gave, the editor makes one enormous improvement: s/he replaces "put the mouse over" with "hover", the standard term for what the author was getting at. I think this is a really good example of where a little editing greatly enhances a question. I am pretty sure some folks would read the original and not be quite sure what the author was getting at, and then move on. Same with "It's a small and basic box" being changed to "It's a small box and the text is unformatted" -- I think that's subtly clearer, and makes the question easier to understand and hence to answer.

Answer 2

This is by far one of the many reasons I'm attracted to this platform; it's easy to make the site look really professional through edits, and it's easy to make posts look like they were designed to be more permanent and not just some random snapshot of the Internet at a specific moment in time.

Dennis, the editor, is a 10k+ user, so this is hardly rep whoring. This person also has a habit of participating in activities on the site that further benefit it, so it seems clear that his goals with these edits are to make the site better and more professional looking.

Even then, if we get into the habit of accusing every single person of rep whoring, who does something positive for the site, then we might want to step back and ask ourselves what our goals are.

Genghis Khan: "It's not sufficient I succeed. Everyone else must fail."

We mustn't forget that there is a reason new editors are incentivised with +2 reputation for making good, constructive edits to posts. The goal is to reward them for good, constructive edits, and help guide and coach them on how to make better edits when they do something wrong. This prepares them for that 2k mark, when they're able to make edits on their own.

While there are cases where there are pointless edits, let's not go on a witch hunt looking at what the editors' intentions are. Instead, look at the post and ask yourself if it was substantially improved or not. If it was, great, approve it. If not, then reject the edits.

Answer 3

I agree that many of the changes seem to be gratuitous - it is possible that the editor initially only wanted to improve the formatting of the list, but the system wouldn't let them make such a small change, so further "improvements" were needed in order to get the edit through.

Having said that, the editor has 10k+ reputation on the site and I believe that with such reputation there is no such limitation, so must conclude that the editor was trying to improve the style of the post - the problem here is that whether the style is better or not is a judgement call and entirely subjective.