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I know you can lose your privileges when your reputation falls below a threshold after reading Can you lose an ability if your reputation falls below a threshold?

Also, I know that your protected/closed/deleted questions will remain the same.

I saw one user's reputation dropped by almost 500 points from a little over 2K to 1.5K in one day and he earned a large part of his reputation by suggesting edits. Most of his edit suggestions have been either incomplete or erroneous. (I am not linking them for privacy and they are not important).

My question is what would happen to those edits made by the user after reaching 2K rep points? Obviously, if the 500 points, he lost suddenly, were made illegitimately, the edits (he made after 2K rep) have also been made without earning the privilege, which means his edits might not be as trustworthy as those made by other 2K users.

Would those edits be automatically put into the edit review queue as if they had been suggested by an under 2K rep user?

If not, wouldn't it be better to have this feature set up since those edits were made by a user who had not earned the trust of a community?

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    This sounds a bit like "set all the convicts free if the judge is not re-elected." The activity was valid at the time it was performed, so the action stands. – Robert Cartaino Aug 17 '16 at 19:14
  • @RobertCartaino It is disputable whether the activity was valid at the time. The activity was done thanks to the rep points he should not have earned in the first place. In other words, the activity would not have happened if there had been no reputation gained by illegitimate means. – Rathony Aug 17 '16 at 19:18
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    I don't really see how common this is going to be... if someone earns rep for edits, that means that people have reviewed those edits and determined that they were acceptable... If they are bad edits, that's an issue with the review process, not the edit submissions... they should never have made it through review.... that's what review is for. Adding more content to the review queue... when the reviewers aren't doing their job isn't going to fix anything, either... – Catija♦ Aug 17 '16 at 19:21
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    Rathony, Do you cancel their votes? Remove their comments? Wipe out any chat rooms they created? Remove multiple links in their posts? What about tags they created or review-queue actions they can no longer do? That is a mighty long thread to pull! – Robert Cartaino Aug 17 '16 at 19:23
  • @RobertCartaino Voting has nothing to do with the threshold for edit as it is set far lower than the editing privilege. Comments, chat messages are irrelevant to my question. Multiple edits (if there is another edit after it) could be a potential problem that I didn't foresee. – Rathony Aug 17 '16 at 19:25
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    You're missing his point... if we retroactively do this for one privilege, that would imply that we need to do it for all privileges... all of the things he mentioned are privileges that might need to be rolled back. – Catija♦ Aug 17 '16 at 19:26
  • Rathony, these are still ALL privileges you can lose if you fall below a certain reputation. – Robert Cartaino Aug 17 '16 at 19:26
  • @RobertCartaino Well, I understand that. But, would their chat message, comments, votes would harm the community in the same way an erroneous or incomplete edits would do? That's my point. It doesn't mean I don't understand your point. 2K threshold seems to be too low for some communities. I will raise that issue later. Thanks for your comments. – Rathony Aug 17 '16 at 19:39
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Would those edits be automatically put into the edit review queue as if they had been suggested by an under 2K rep user?

No. When you're over 2K reputation, your edits are immediately applied. They're not pulled back and then put in the review queue.

Similarly, a suggested edit you make when you're below 2K doesn't magically get pulled from the review queue when you get above 2K reputation. It'll still need to be reviewed (although now you could be the one doing the review).

To recap: Edits that you make when under 2K reputation go into the review queue for review. Edits that you make when 2K reputation or higher are immediately applied. Your later reputation has no bearing on the edits you make now.

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To address the feature request part of this -

No, this feature request would be impossible. Since edits by 2K users are immediately applied, if a user loses sufficient rep to drop below 2K what would that do?

  • Cause the immediate rollback of all of the edits that were made? - What if other edits have been made in the interim?
  • Toss every edit they've made since hitting 2K to go into the review queue? In addition to rolling the edits back or by itself?

For what time frame? The last day? The last week? The entire time they've been 2K?

Honestly, if their edits are that horrid, they've probably already been fixed, so there's no reason to retroactively force roll them back. If the edits aren't universally horrid, again, there's no reason to roll back potentially helpful content.

If they've had a major loss of rep like that, certainly the mods will be reviewing their recent contributions already, so I feel that any major issues will be noticed.

If, instead, their rep loss is due to offering a bounty, for example, why would we want to implement this? Those edits are likely perfectly fine. There's no reason to throw a bunch of content into review just because someone posts a bounty on a question.

The need case for this is minuscule as it's very rare that this would happen for the reason of poor editing and the "fix" is extremely complex and would be difficult to implement well.

For this reason, I think this feature request should be declined.

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  • Where exactly did I mention or propose immediate rollback? What does immediate rollback have to do with putting the edits into the review queue? – Rathony Aug 17 '16 at 19:20
  • @Rathony: That's essentially what would need to happen if the edits were to be "undone" and moved to the review queue. – ale Aug 17 '16 at 19:23
  • @AlE. What I am proposing is those edits should be reviewed in one way or another. Would rolling them back harm the community? I think not reviewing them could do more harm than rolling them back because they were made by an untrustworthy user. My points is those edits should not have been made. – Rathony Aug 17 '16 at 19:29
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    So? They should be handled just like anything else that a user may have done with more privileges than they should have had. Fix it yourself, or flag for a moderator. In fact, edits are probably easiest to deal with because everybody can see them and anybody can fix them. – ale Aug 17 '16 at 19:33

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