Could authors overturn recent community review decisions?

Question

When new users edit a post, the review is posted to a review queue and other reputable users can review the edit and choose to approve or reject it. However, I feel that a lot of people do it pretty quickly.

Onato suggested an edit to my answer on how to enumerate NSDictionary items. He was fixing broken links in the answer, and as soon as I saw it I knew it would have been a good edit. However, only one reviewer found so, and three others rejected it. I ended up manually doing the edit, and poor Onato didn't get any credit for it (in fact, he got an undeserved 'rejected' for it).

The point I want to bring is that, first and foremost, the person who wrote the answer probably knows best if an edit is acceptable or not. Could there be a time frame where the author of the answer (or question) can overturn a review decision?

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EDIT: one more perfectly fine edit was rejected by overeager reviewers as well. I absolutely disagree with the notion that the community knows better. The community repeatedly proves that it only wants Internet points.

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EDIT: I told a commenter to fix something himself in one of my posts, but the community rejected it. I went back and applied the changes myself. It's not credited to him and his stats got a rejected edit now (which really should be an approved edit). The reason ("This edit is incorrect or an attempt to reply to or comment on the existing post") is blatantly wrong and shows once more that the community has much less insight into edit quality than the people who wrote the answers in the first place. It's true that the UI didn't make it easy for them, but those guys clearly didn't read the comment thread; I did, because as the author, I was notified.

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EDIT: This time around, a user fixed a blatant (though small) mistake in one of my accepted answers. One hour later, another, unrelated 10k user edited my post to revert the edit, even though it had been approved by the community. I went back to undo his undo.

This goes on again to show that an active user is the best judge for the quality of an edit, and that since I can have the last word on edits on my own posts, I should be allowed to retroactively overturn a community edit vote and accordingly credit the person who proposed the change.

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EDIT I wrote a surprisingly bad answer years ago. Some guy found it and tried to fix it but the community thought that it wasn't worth it. I think that the changes are great and once more I'll integrate them by myself into my post. Unfortunately for this user, he won't be credited for it. I still don't understand why I can't have a binding vote on edits on my posts.

Answer 1

This has bugged me for years too; I have full edit rights over my own posts, I can single-handedly approve or reject any edit suggested to them if I catch it in time, why can't I override an approval or rejection if an edit happens to get reviewed while I'm asleep?

Well, now we can! Oded toiled away for weeks to make this happen, and collaborated with Nick to get the rep-effects working too. Here's how it works:

• Any suggested edit to a question or answer that hasn't been edited after the edit was approved or rejected may be overridden.
• Only the author of the post that was edited and diamond moderators can override suggested edits.
• A suggested edit can only be overridden once.

You can tell when this was done by looking for the following text in the Edit Summary of the revision:

Edit approval overridden by post owner or moderator

When viewing a suggested edit that you can override, the "Next" button will be replaced with either "Approve" (if it was previously declined) or "Reject" (if it was previously approved):

Clicking this button will confirm the action, and then...

• ...if the edit was previously rejected, it will be marked Approved and the edit will be applied to the post.
• ...if the edit was previously approved, it will be marked Rejected and the previously-applied edit will be rolled back (complete with a comment in the revision history that describes what happened). If the editor earned +2 reputation for the edit, that will be retracted.

Once overridden, the edit affects the editor's suggested-edit stats accordingly. This allows moderators a tool to deal with the occasional bizarre form of abuse.

Special thanks to jmac, animuson, hairboat and Jon for helping me to test this! If you find a bug, it's all their fault (but please report it here on meta anyway).

Answer 2

I tend to agree that the community should have the final word. However, from very recent experience, I feel that the current system is inadequate.

My suggestion: as the author of an answer that has received a rejected edit, I would like the power to reopen the review process and cast the first vote to approve the edit.

Here is a recent example from my experience:

https://stackoverflow.com/review/suggested-edits/2243755

• My answer is largely correct but has two parameters in the wrong order in two function calls
• Another user, Blaine Kasten, who is relatively new to SO and has low rep comes in and suggests an edit that fixes the problem
• The edit is wrongly rejected, presumably by users who don't know any better; the function call in question is not that well-known and my reputation is relatively high.

So my choices were:

1. Make the edit myself. However, if I do this, all Blaine Kasten has to show for this is an incorrect rejection for his edit and no credit, which seems like unnecessary discouragement for a new user.
2. Flag for moderator attention, hoping that moderators have the power to overturn the edit rejection, which seems a little bit of a waste of their time.

I chose the second option.

This is not the first time this has happened to me. I suspect my relatively high reputation predisposes reviewers, who probably do not spend as long on their review as an editor spends on their edit, to favour my original answer.

Answer 3

The point I want to bring is that, first and foremost, the person who wrote the answer probably knows best if an edit is acceptable or not.

First and foremost, this is probably not true. It may very well be true for your posts, but in general when someone's post is being edited it's usually (although not always) because of mistakes that the author made. While occasionally they're capable of recognizing those mistakes, it's very often the case that they don't know enough to really evaluate the quality of the edit effectively; if they did, they probably wouldn't have made the mistake to begin with.

If a user's post is full of spelling grammar issues then odds are they don't know enough to know if the corrections are valid. If they didn't use formatting properly then they're unlikely to be in a case to know if the changed formatting is also appropriate for that type of content. If the user posted content in a way that's not in line with the site's guidelines (including signatures, salutations, offtopic tangents, etc.) in posts then they're unlikely to be able to effectively judge an edit that is removing such content.

So yes, there are certainly users who are capable of effectively reviewing edits on their posts, but they're in the minority, which is why I very much agree with allowing the author to review the post, regardless of rep, and to give them a binding vote, but to not push a user too strongly to review the content, or even prevent the content from being pushed through without an author review.

Beyond the ability of the author to review there are a number of other issues. The post can't be edited by anyone while there is a pending edit. If there is a poor quality edit on a poor quality post it's important to be able to reject it quickly so that a proper edit can be made on it. Additionally, if the edit is of high quality then we want that edit to be applied as soon as it can be confirmed of good quality so that the post's quality can be improved for future readers. It's possible to drive away potential answerers by leaving a post in it's lower quality state while we wait for the author to review it.

Answer 4

First of all, good question.

Users with the privilege to review edits are, in definition, trusted reviewers. Which means that the community judge they have been here long enough or have made their proofs enough to review edits by others.
With that in mind, if the review edits were 3 against 1 for a fixed link, there must be a valid reason behind that (note that it relies on the reviewers opinion so there is no perfect solution. Not everybody thinks alike). Maybe the reviewers judged that one change have been made but it could have been improved in some other points and was not.

The community have, in my opinion, the last word on what the post should look like. Not the user. Also good to remind that the user knows (should know) how to post a valid question/answer in the first place and he always have the choice to go back and edit it's original post without approval from the community.

tl;dr : No the user should not have the choice to revert the community's final decision. If he would have that power, what's the whole point of voting system on reviews ?

Answer 5

I say no. The author of a question doesn't own the content, SE / the community does.

As this is the case, there is the possibility that an editor makes an edit that the author likes, but the community thinks is unacceptable and, when the answer would then be flagged, the OP gets the punishment for the edit which was made, and not the editor.

In this specific case, however, I don't think the edit was major enough to warrant an approved suggested edit at all, and should have been instead left as a comment (which the reviewer could have done, he has 54 reputation).