Editing summaries aren't peer reviewed, moderated or otherwise subject to the protections that posts and comments are. Therefore they can sometimes become snarky and harmful. Should an otherwise-satisfactory edit be rejected due to a harmful edit message? And indeed, once it is accepted, there's no way to edit or delete it.
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6Some recent discussion on this topic on MSO: meta.stackoverflow.com/q/424548/4014959– PM 2RingMay 29 at 12:13
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1On MSO, the following discussion is a bit more on-point "Should reviewers who don’t reject a rude review comment be review suspended?", but it primarily just reiterates the long-standing policy, as described in answer to: "Rude edit summaries" and other duplicates of the post linked in a comment above, that suggested edits with inappropriate edit summaries should be rejected and that R/A edit summaries should be flagged.– MakyenMay 29 at 23:34
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Note: The answer to: "Rude edit summaries" is from Tim Post, who was a Stack Overflow employee at the time that answer was posted.– MakyenMay 29 at 23:38
1 Answer
Well, ♦ moderators can edit edit summaries. If you see a particular harmful one, you can flag the post and ask them to change it.
Should an otherwise-satisfactory edit be rejected due to a harmful edit message?
Yes - even if the edit itself is good, you'd think you'd be able to solve that by choosing Improve edit, change the edit summary (and something else to make sure it's an edit), but that would only apply to your edit and not the suggested one (which generates a separate revision). And approving the edit gives the suggester +2 reputation, and we don't want to encourage this behaviour.
Anyway, it's good that you pay attention to them while reviewing, because it's very easy to overlook them.
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2If the summary is harmful, I'd accept a moderator flag on the question to edit the summary. I'd hope moderators from other sites would too.– MastMay 29 at 15:55