A way to "downvote" a suggested edit and affect both the edit suggester and reviewers

Question

I find a lot of suggested edits pretty poor. For me, it feels like that more than a half of the suggested edits doesn't properly address all issues in the post. The trigger of today was this particular example. It does not remove the PLEASE HELP ME screaming of the OP and even more, it introduces 2 bad edits:

1. using code tags to highlight framework/library name and
2. using <br> tag to introduce a paragraph. There are many, many things which can be done better. It has been properly rejected as "too minor" once, but it is after all approved twice.

I would like to see kind of a mechanism to "downvote" an approved suggested edit. This should affect both the person who suggested the edit and the persons who approved it anyway. In general, I find that both the edit suggestors and suggested edit reviewers are doing a poor job in such case. Suggested edits shouldn't yield reps too easily and the reviewers should review them more carefully.

Answer 1

I think this is one of the more serious problems with the site right now. There are so many bad edits in the system, but what's worse is that nobody is rejecting them. There are many more bad reviewers than good reviewers. People are able to ride this system to 2k rep by spamming edits and then they graduate from bad editor to bad reviewer, and the circle repeats.

I would love to see either some form of downvoting or flagging of bad edits and (though I can't imagine how) bad reviews. The problem is that, when I see somebody doing an awful job of reviewing edits, I have no recourse. I've gone so far as to find people's Twitter handle in their profile and ping them on Twitter to ask them to please stop allowing awful edits through.

I also find myself racing to "improve" an edit, just so that I can uncheck the "This edit was helpful" checkbox and deprive the editor of the small amount of rep they're after, before the "I ACCEPT EVERY EDIT" train comes through and auto-approves everything.

Answer 2

Don't get me wrong, I like the review system. But I think it can be even better.

The problem with bad reviewers is that there is no automatic way to stop a person from reviewing. The only tool a bad reviewer has to improve himself, is looking at the results of other reviewers. And of course common sense.

In my opinion the system is a bit in favor of accepting:

1. Accepting is easy, it only takes a single click, no thinking required. And twenty days of fifty clicks gives you a gold badge.
2. Reject votes are not visible unless you click on "reject". So there is no visible sign that an edit is suspect.
3. You get badges and your name is shown in a top 20 list if you have enough clicks that day.

Some improvements could be:

1. In order to be accepted, each reject vote should be countered by two approve votes. So if normally three votes are required to accept an edit, it needs five if it has a single reject vote.
2. There should be a visible clue if a reject vote has been cast.

Ideally there should be a mechanism to stop bad reviewers. But the problem is that this requires a review of the reviewers. Maybe a way to flag accepted edits that are wrong, and a certain amount of flags stops the person from reviewing for a time. But that mechanism is vulnerable for misuse.

Another problem is minor edits. Often an edit is good, but it is too minor (one typo, one tag). So maybe we need an accept as minor. Which preserves the edit, but the suggester gets no reward other than the eternal fame.

Answer 3

I was (maybe still am) someone who was not the best editor. I would see a mistake, go in and correct it, but I wouldn't be as thorough in reviewing the rest of the post as I should have been, so other mistakes would slip by. I've been reading MSO a lot more recently and am starting to learn the error of my ways (and have tried to make better edits in the recent past, although I probably still have a ways to go).

As I do not have 2K rep yet, I can't speak for how to fix the reviewers, but I think part of the problem with the editors is the fact that there is no real notification of a rejected edit. It just disappears unless you start looking through your edit history to see what happened. I have had 5 rejected edits and I don't recall getting any kind of notification that the edit was rejected or feedback beyond "too minor". I think most editors have the best intentions, but do not know they should be doing more. What is needed is some way to provide (anonymous) constructive criticism as to why an edit was rejected (or even if it was accepted by was borderline). A rejected edit should appear in the inbox and maybe offer more than a one-liner as feedback. Also maybe to help editors get off on the right foot is to require mod approval of edits from users with less than 10 approved edits? At least this way, the user should get more constructive feedback initially and try to steer them in the correct direction.

Another problem I've found in the process is somewhat of a confusion conflict of "rules". One one hand, edits are supposed to "substantially improve the post" but on the other hand, we have MSO discussions like this one that say titles are not supposed to include tag data, or this one that says posts are not supposed to include "thanks" or "please help me" or other extraneous remarks. But if that is the only thing that is wrong with the post, the edit might be rejected as too minor. So what is the line between cleaning up a question and too minor of an edit to be approved?

Answer 4

I support this because it's a way to get the attention of edit suggestors and suggestion reviewers. However, that alone is not enough. Once we have their attention, we need to direct them to the guidelines for editing and reviewing. That way, they learn how to do things correctly, and just as importantly, the rationale behind correct behavior.

If we don't take the opportunity to teach, then we'll just be treating symptoms, not causes. People might understand that they're doing something wrong, but they won't understand what/how, so they won't improve, and we'll be stuck in a never-ending cycle of meta-moderation that takes up time and effort but doesn't solve the problem.

Also, there's one potential significant flaw with using downvotes here: users can't fix mistakes in suggested edits. Regular downvotes are attached to posts, and if the posts get improved through editing, the downvotes can be removed. There's no way to change a suggested edit after it's been judged. At most, I would support removing the +2 rep reward for having a suggestion approved if a "downvote" is cast. Tacking on a permanent/irreversible -2 seems too harsh.

(In fairness to the OP, it's possible that this is what he meant all along. The definition of "'downvote'" in the question was left ambiguous.)

Answer 5

The problem with the suggestion as it stands is that the rejecting reviewer may be the one who is in error, and the edit should be accepted.

If you doubt the likelihood of this happening, here's a very concrete example:

• From the SuperUser site guidance on tag excerpts, "if you walked up to any random person on the street and said the tag word to them, and they would know what you were talking about — then don’t bother explaining the tag at all. Stick to usage of the tag within your community in the excerpt."
• Noticing that the SuperUser tag excerpt for Windows 8 told us it was a "graphical operating system" and was released on a certain date, I edited the excerpt in line with the above guidance to match the Windows 7 excerpt, giving site usage only rather than explaining the tag. My edit was rejected. Both rejecting reviewers stated, "This edit does not make the post even a little bit easier to read, easier to find, more accurate or more accessible. Changes are either completely superfluous or actively harm readability."

I repeated the edit the next day, and not too surprisingly, it was accepted. I only mention it to make the point that a rejecting review doesn't prove an accepting reviewer was wrong to accept an edit.

Answer 6

One suggestion would be to increase the reputation needed to review edits. But that would burden the already-heavily-"privileged" users with even more work.

If users with an "accept-everything" mentality are banned from doing so for a while, then, once again, the people who are doing a good job will get more work to do.

For free. Which can get old pretty quickly.

What about some swag? T-shirts, mugs, anything? What about a point system that has some actual trade-in value for something besides more advertising for a particular question? Like trade-in for swag?

Wikipedia can claim non-profit reasons for thing, but Stack Exchange, Inc., is very, very much for profit. Am I the only one that can see the Invisible Hand here? (Oh, wait ...)

Answer 7

I see vote down requires 125 points, and vote up requires 15. Perhaps have a similar rep requirement: 2k to reject, and 4k to accept. That way people get used to actually rejecting edits before they have the power to approve.

Also, remove badges relating to reviewing. I would prefer people who review because they want to, rather than those that review just because they want another badge

Answer 8

There's this website called newgrounds.com has a system where people can vote on submissions and get points for it.

One thing they do, is they give you additional points if you've voted the same way that others have.

I think that we can take a similar approach to the suggestion reviewing issue.

Only award the point toward the badge, if the reviewer had approved an overall approved post or if the reviewer had rejected an overall rejected edit.

Now this might lead to the obvious problem of approvals being more likely than rejections regardless, but this can be mitigated by splitting the badge into 2 badges. One for voting to approve edits that have been approved, and one for voting to reject edits that end up getting rejected.

With such a system in place, people will have more of an incentive to be correct in their reviewing. rather than just choosing something.

Answer 9

As many have pointed out a bigger issue than bad editors is bad reviewers. A big part of the problem is that reputation by itself doesn't make someone a good reviewer.

As a thought, what about if, in addition to using a minimum amount of reputation points to enable the review queue, we also required a minimum flag weight. The advantage of using the flag weight is that it is, I think, a better indicator that a user has some positive experience actually doing some reviewing and that they have at least paid some attention to improving the quality of the content on the site.

Perhaps a slightly more complicated version of the above would involve having bad reviews contribute towards your flag weight, with bad reviews being determined by moderators as many have pointed out that you can't rely on what the majority of reviews on a particular review say, since the problem is that the majority is very often made up of poor reviewers.

I don't think this would by any chance eliminate the issue, but it is perhaps a (small?) change that can signification improve the situation.