Is Code Formatting not a Valid Reason for a Post Edit?

Question

I am trying to be a good community member and regularly edit questions to improve the formatting. I believe it is easier for the community to find a fault in some code if it is correctly formatted. I am not talking about a single incorrectly formatted line, but about a whole blocks of code WITHOUT any formatting.

Lately, a lot of my suggested edits have received "rejections" because they were deemed "too minor".

A good example would be the my edit #1711877

So my question is: Should I stop editing formatting issues? What would not be deemed "too minor"?

I don't want to mess with the editing if it is not welcomed in this community, but would continue if it is deemed helpful. So what's the verdict?

Answer 1

I would have rejected your edit as well. Are such edits not welcome? Sure they are. But looking at this post, I see several other issues which should have been addressed as well. Primarily in the text before and after the code block.

There is a lack of proper capitalization. There are sections of code in the text not formatted as such. And one of those sections as a result partially disappears. Overall, you've missed too much.

It seems you have merely focussed on the code and thereby missed some of the other issues. Whenever you go in to edit a post, please look at the post in its entirety. If you fix all the issues you see, you're less like to have one of your edits rejected.

Answer 2

The answer is yes AND no :

• If you reformat the code and that was the only issue in the post well fine.

• If you reformat the code but the capitalization was lacking, the syntax was horrible and many other issues are present, well that's not fine.

I often do reformatting but I make sure that everything else (or what I can see) is fine. Often, new users forgot to capitalize sentences or to write i => I. And these should be edited at the same time. Reviewing suggested edits takes time from people and thus, the suggested edits should take in considerations all the issues of the post.

Another issue to take care of is tags. There are often users who add some very popular tags that are totally unrelated to the question just to get more attention. Always check the tags when editing.

Answer 3

As one of the reviewers who rejected your post, the reason why I rejected it was that I could see the first sentence starting with a lowercase letter, later a lowercase i, and un-marked-up code at the end. This made me think you had just formatted the main code without reviewing the whole post.

If you see something obviously wrong like an incorrect tag, misspelled title or poorly formatted code, then editing is the right option. Just make sure you read through the rest of the post to see if there is anything else you can fix.

Answer 4

I don't think you gentlemen are being completely fair. We all have our own preferences for code formatting, all adopted in the interest of making code readable to our own eyes. When someone makes a good faith effort to improve code readability, that should be accepted in the same good faith, as an honest effort.

To reject an edit for simply addressing code formatting, and not addressing correct grammar, punctuation and capitalization, presumes that every potential editor on this site is as comfortable in the English language as we are; and has had the same benefit of exposure to good grammar, good literaure, and good instruction inthe English language. If you expect every editor to be perfect, on every edit, then those of you who are perfect will have a lot more editing work to look forward to.