Should micro-editing for the sake of rep be discouraged? [duplicate]

Question

I often find myself frustrated when reviewing suggested edits, as too often they appear to be minor and insignificant, stuff like adding backquotes on a single term, making some of the words bold, or removing a "thank you". If this is too obvious I just reject it, but these edits are often still accepted by others who probably care less or think that even tiny edits are justified.

On top of that, I can already recognize some users as serial editors, and judging by their rep summary I can see they often reach the daily cap of edits. In some cases most of their rep comes just from editing, without questions or answers (they're hardly bounded by the 1000 max on editing since they're under 2k anyway).

Now, I know the +2 bonus is there to encourage making the site better, and in most cases I think an edit totally deserves it and I usually approve helpful edits even if they're minor things like indentation and formatting, but I can't help thinking that we've got a hole in the rep system - should minor touch-ups on any 5 questions off the top of the list (and there's always something to edit, especially junk questions), really equal an upvote on a decent answer? In some topics a good answer might get no more than 1-2 upvotes simply because there aren't enough people browsing them, so what you get from taking the time to answer and explain if often less than what you could get by just editing random stuff.

Is there a way to close this hole? for e.g.:

• Add "approve without rep" button for cases where the edit doesn't really merit it.
• Auto-detect tiny edits (adding just backticks or bold/italic changes for e.g. - not including whitespaces used for code formatting and indentation)
• Lower the rep bonus
• Reduce the daily/total cap for edits
• Increase the min edit size (currently 6 characters, excluding whitespaces)

Or is it perfectly acceptable activity and I should approve these edits without an afterthought?

Answer 1

Add "approve without rep" button for cases where the edit doesn't really merit it.

This already exists. If you click Improve on the review screen, there's a checkbox labeled "Suggested edit was helpful." If you uncheck the box, the editor will not receive any reputation for the edit.

You should only use this if you are going to make substantial improvements to the post though. If the original edit truly was worthless, just reject the edit. If we use both of these tools correctly, micro-edits will be discouraged.

If you see someone hitting the reputation cap every day by making meaningless edits, you can also flag one of their posts for a moderator and we can send them a message.