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In relation with What guidance should be given when edits are rejected?, it occurs to me that we aren't providing much guidance to reviewers regarding when they should approve edits.

Suggested edit review guidance

“Approve edits you know are correct” — yes, sure, but when is an edit correct? Only for a small minority of suggested edits does it come down to the factual correctness of some statement.

At a minimum, there should be a link to the help page on editing here. Plenty of people who reach the suggested edit review aren't intimately familiar with the rules and etiquette of editing on Stack Exchange.

In addition, there should probably be a paragraph or so, tailored to the type of post (question, answer, or tag wiki) to guide reviewers as to what edits are acceptable. Or should the review screen show the same bullet points that show up in the right margin when editing?

What guidance should be shown to suggested edit reviewers?

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I absolutely agree, and I also think we need to teach people the difference between a tag wiki and tag wiki excerpt as I've had some issues in the past because of reviewers not knowing which is which.

What guidance should be shown to suggested edit reviewers?

I think the first few times you make an edit, you should get a statement that says the following:

This is a suggested edit to a [suggested edit type]. You should approve this edit if it:

Followed by a list of criteria clearly labelled as Does and Does Not. There are some which would be generic, for example:

  • Does make the [suggested edit type] noticeably easier to understand (fixes spelling errors, grammatical mistakes or formatting problems)
  • Does not introduce any new problems into the post

In addition to these two, there would be more specific suggestions depending on the type. For example:

  1. Question edits

    The general guidelines plus 'Does not radically change the meaning or intent of the question' and 'Does not attempt to answer, comment on, or vandalise the question'

  2. Answer edits

    The general guidelines plus 'Does not radically change the meaning or intent of the answer' and 'Does not attempt to comment on or vandalise the answer'

  3. Tag wiki excerpt edits

    The general guidelines plus 'Does accurately describe the subjects this tag covers', 'Does not attempt to add formatting to the excerpt', and 'Does not plagiarise content. Search for the text of this edit on a search engine to ensure the content has not been copied directly from another website.'

  4. Tag wiki edits

    The general guidelines plus 'Does accurately describe the subjects this tag covers in a page or less' and 'Does not plagiarise content without attribution. Search for the text of this edit on a search engine to ensure the content has not been copied directly from another website.'

I think this covers all the most basic reasons for approval and rejection, however some sites may want additional reasons based on their own rules.

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    I like the "does"/"does not" differentiation. Is specific, and can be easily followed
    – Braiam
    Sep 5, 2014 at 16:44
  • I would remove the word “substantially”. We got rid of the “too minor” reject reason for a reason.
    – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
    Sep 12, 2014 at 12:17
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    Could you please post the text in addition to the images, or even instead of? Making people download and read images is a bit insensitive (think of blind people).
    – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
    Sep 12, 2014 at 12:18

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