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I’ve recently noticed that many of my posts get edited by new users, and the edits are subsequently approved (often unanimously).

Great, right?

Yes. Except that many of these edits are spurious, or wrong. The first kind irks me somewhat but is tolerable. The second kind, not so much.

Here are two examples from the last day:

  • How can I check if a file is empty? – The edit doesn’t invalidate the answer, it’s just completely superfluous. I don’t particularly resent it, I just think it shouldn’t have been approved: that’s not what edits are for.

  • Why should files end with a newline? – The editor apparently confused the words “expect” and “except”. No biggie, but all but one reviewer didn’t notice this.

That’s not review. It’s just clicking “ok”.

I realise that there are already measures in place to catch noop reviewers. But they don’t seem to be working particularly well, at least as far as I can tell.

I have no solution. I just wanted to offer this anecdote for consideration.

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    People have been complaining about this since suggested edits were first introduced. It has been a legitimate problem that whole time. This isn't really anything new.
    – Servy
    Commented Apr 23, 2014 at 20:45
  • @Servy Ah, apologies then. I’ve searched for it first but I might have been over-eager and not patient enough to read up on existing discussions.
    – Konrad Rudolph
    Commented Apr 23, 2014 at 20:47
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    Things are improving (mods can now tell users why they're banned from review when adding a manual ban), but there are more feature requests that would improve the mod side further.
    – Flexo - Save the data dump
    Commented Apr 23, 2014 at 20:49
  • @Servy not really, it became a real problem when badges for reviewing were introduced and tons of users started reviewing.
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented Apr 23, 2014 at 20:55
  • @ShadowWizard It got worse when that happened (granted, by a lot), and the amount of complaining on meta definitely shot up drastically, but it was still a real problem before then, and people still complained about it being a problem before then. In fact, ironically, several of the changes made when /review came out were specifically designed to make it harder for people to review in this manor (I'm thinking specifically of the one post per page, rather than 50 posts per page here).
    – Servy
    Commented Apr 23, 2014 at 20:56
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    What can we do to stop bad edits getting accepted? (and I'm not claiming I was the first). Shouldn't this be on [meta.so]? On other sites, it isn't nearly as bad. And of course the converse.
    – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
    Commented Apr 23, 2014 at 20:57
  • @Gilles Yep, it’s definitely a dupe. Not sure where the question belongs, I mostly use SO but the problem seemed – at least in principle – general.
    – Konrad Rudolph
    Commented Apr 23, 2014 at 21:16
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    On P.SE I've got a meta bit about trying to make sure that minor edits that do improve the question (be it as simple as fixing the punctuation) do go through rather than marked as too minor. At times we've had people rejecting good edits with 'too minor' and have either mustered quick second approves in chat or gone back and edited them in ourselves. Each site seems to have its own flavor of this problem - though certainly not every site gets the too many approved problem.
    – user213963
    Commented Apr 23, 2014 at 21:29

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