Not everyone who makes minor edits is looking for reputation

Question

Original Statement:

I know Stack Overflow a bit (because of some of the other sites in the network). This is not really a question, but just for reference' sake: not everyone who makes minor edits is looking for reputation.

I made a little formatting edit here of which I know it is minor, but it is necessary because it messed up the code (the OP forgot a ' which makes the code run with an error!). This is not trivial. I had to add two little words for the edit to be large enough (and I did not want to ignore the mistake).

I think it is a bit lame to reject that edit (suggesting that "This edit is incorrect or an attempt to reply to or comment on the existing post."). Especially if the question is edited in the review queue after all. Either there is nothing to be edited or there is and in that case there is no reason to reject the edit. Why would you reject an edit and then do it yourself? Or am I misunderstanding something? Was the edit already made by the first edit reviewer? Hmm not sure here.

I am used to editing regularly on a site where I have +2000 rep, so it has become something automatic. Rejecting these edits does not encourage me to edit at all under 2000 rep.

Revised Statement:

From the answers below I retain that there are several principles for dealing with suggested edits:

1. edits can be minor IF they deal with all the problems in a post. This explains why my edit was rejected, yet done manually by the reviewers. It does not explain why the people reviewing my edit did not also take care of the other problems in that answer.

2. editors really have different views. Because I was criticized for dealing only with the code problem and not with the grammar issues in the question, I revisited the question, now also reviewing grammar. Again, two reviewers thought the edit was too minor. Three reviewers accepted it. (Interestingly, the ones that accepted it have a good accept/decline ratio, but I guess that is by accident :). In the comments on the present post, the grammar was called appalling, yet for others changing it is perceived as too minor. Bottom-line: reviewing edits is subjective and democratic.

3. Many reviewers complain in the comments that minor edits needlessly take up their time and thus they tend to reject them. This is not communicated back directly to the editor unless he/she goes to look for it. The educative part of reviewing edit suggestions is underdeveloped. The editor should automatically be notified his edit was rejected and why. In my opinion, reviewers that edit a question based on a suggested edit, should also deal with all other problems in that post for precisely this reason. As such the editor can learn from the reviewer. After all, the overall quality of the site is in view.

I retract the following statement:

Certain reviewers have a 50/50 reject/approve ratio or worse. That is unfruitful (if not plain arrogant) and against the community policy [**edit**: there is no community policy on this, see Cody's answer].

It might be handy to check what the reject/approve ratio is for our most trusted users. A very quick check makes me believe that moderators, for instance, accept more than reject. But again, that is to be verified. As there is no hard and fast data, I retract that statement and apologize if it offended anyone.

For reviewers of suggested edits

Suggesting edits actually also takes time and effort. Please do not think that small edits that do not completely revise grammar and style (but that do fix a bug in the code) are somehow minor edits or attempts to gain reputation.

Answer 1

Err, first of all, there is no clear "community policy" on this. You found one post that confirms your personal point of view and linked to it. The answer just below it, from the site's founder, with nearly the same score, and a 50 point bounty awarded to it, says something completely different.

Second, the reason we reject edits for being "too minor" has little to do with the reputation gain of the suggestor. Or at least, that's the furthest thing from my mind. Two of the more pressing concerns are:

• The process of suggesting and reviewing edits is expensive, in terms of the number of trusted community members that must be involved to evaluate and vote on the edits. At a minimum, it requires 3 of us; sometimes more if the edits are contentious. That's 3+ people that could be doing something else to clean up the site. If you're not making a difference, you're effectively wasting our time, and we'll hit the "Reject" button as a deterrent.

• The age of the question being edited, and whether it's worth bumping for a trivial edit that adds nothing of substance.

If you don't want to have your edits rejected as "too minor", there is a simple solution: fix everything you see that is wrong with the post. Rarely is a post so perfect that there is nothing else wrong with it but a single character out of place.. Dream bigger. Make your edit count.

That's part of the problem here, with the edit in question. I see several immediate problems with the post that you neglected to fix (despite hacking around the character limitations by adding some nonsense):

1. The grammar is bad, and that makes it difficult to understand. Pronouns are missing, and so are commas.
2. URL, CSV, and HTML are acronyms, and therefore always set in uppercase. They are lowercase here.
3. Descriptive text preceding a code block should always be followed by punctuation (generally a colon or a comma).

Had you fixed all of those things, your edit would have easily been over the 6 character limit, and I would have definitely hit the "Approve" button.

In the form it was actually submitted, I would have used the "Improve" button to fix the stuff you didn't. But I probably still would have unchecked the "this edit was helpful" box, which would have caused the Community user to reject your edit.

Although I agree, the rejection reason that Rune FS picked was incorrect. DrYap's was a better choice.

I am used to editing regularly on a site where I have +2000 rep, so it has become something automatic. Rejecting these edits does not encourage me to edit at all under 2000 rep.

Well, the truth is, you shouldn't be making these excessively minor edits on other sites either. Although the "trivial edit" restrictions are relaxed because other users are not required to review your edits, the expectation still holds that if you're going to edit a post, you should fix all of the mistakes that you see.

Answer 2

I would definitely have accepted this edit: it fixes a minor error in an answer. It's a typo in code. Sure, anyone who understands the answer would figure out the typo easily, but that's no reason to force every reader to go through this. This edit is not too minor because it fixes a major issue in the post. Generally speaking, edits that correct factual errors are not too minor.

The most common kind of too minor edit is an edit that fixes one or a handful of grammar, spelling or formatting issues while leaving many more. The boundary is obviously subjective to some extent; here's my take on it (for the common cases on Stack Overflow):

• Correct a factual error → major.
• Format blocks of code as code instead of text, or make unescaped HTML appear → major.
• Make an identifier appear as code, remove code formatting use for emphasis, and other formatting issues that concern a single word or short phrase → minor.
• One spelling or grammar correction → minor.
  May be requalified as major if correcting a word that is misspelled throughout and is important search fodder.
• Add an important tag (e.g. the relevant programming language) → major.
• Add or remove a secondary tag → minor.

When you suggest an edit, you should try to fix all the issues you spot. But if you don't have the time or competence for that, then do fix at least one major issue or a large proportion of the minor issues.

In this case, it would have been better if you'd fixed the grammar in the post, but nonetheless your edit was a good one and should have been accepted.

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Note that while I agree with you on the right way to handle this particular suggested edit, your behavior in this meta thread is less than stellar.

Having a high acceptance rate for suggested edits is not the mark of a good reviewer. A “good accept/decline ratio” is not a high one. Accept ratios can vary depending on many factors including whether reviewers review organically or from the queue, what period of time they tend to review in, which suggestions they skip due to a lack of subject knowledge, etc. My own ratio is about 75% acceptance, but I've been doing this for a long time, and I believe that ratio includes my using Improve back when you couldn't mark a suggestion as unhelpful. I don't consider a 50% acceptance ratio any indication that the reviewer is doing a bad job. It does not point towards that reviewer being “unfruitful” and definitely not arrogant.

There are bad approvers and bad rejecters. The problem is symmetrical.

You argue that reviewers should fix all remaining issues in the post. This is backwards: if you're suggesting an edit, you're the one who's supposed to be fixing these issues. You're complaining that other people aren't doing your job for you!

Reviewing suggested edits does have an education value, and Decision on rejected edits should be displayed as a notification to the editor. But that doesn't change the decision that reviewers should take: if a suggestion is bad, it should be rejected, precisely for the education value. Indeed the education value is part of why suggested edits that are too minor are rejected, even though they do improve the post a little bit. (It isn't the only reason: other reasons include the facts that these edits bump the thread and that they move the post closer to community wiki status.)

Answer 3

While that may be true (and probably is for a lot of contributors), something to consider when making edits is that there are a lot of them happening, and that requires time from members to review them.

Those with a high enough rep can perform minor edits without needing approval, hence not taking other people's time with trivial (as in minor) edits.