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There may be some motivations on editing a question:

  1. Correct typos / grammar
  2. Provide a better answer (semantic change)
  3. Bump the question up, so one can get more upvotes

That being, after I do 5 edits; if I care about reputation (which I do, though not THAT much), and I see a typo, or come up with an idea to improve my answer, I have a conflict: Should I give up earning rep for my answer (which took me some effort to write with quality) in order to improve it, or just leave it as is, so I can still get some reward from my effort? (not to mention that I have no warning about it becoming CW)

But just because of the possibility of the 3rd motivation to editing (at least that's what the answers to this question suggest), after 5 owner's edits, the answer is automatically turned to CW.

In fact, the CW solution doesn't really work, once there are other alternatives to bump questions up

So, I'd suggest that, instead of making the answer CW, we simply remove the 3rd motivation: edits would no longer bump the question to the active list (except for the first 5 ones, which we have by default).

Alternatively (worse in my opinion), we should have at least some warning that the extra edit will change the answer to CW...

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5

3 Answers 3

Reset to default
10

New plan to abuse editing on SO for fun and profit

  1. Make n innocuous edits to a post with lots of inbound links / high Google presence
  2. Wait for it to roll off the front page / active lists
  3. Edit in all my linkspam / rickroll
  4. ?
  5. PROFIT!!!
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  • 1
    Because of your awesome, completely foolproof plan, I am tempted to upvote the question now.
    – Jon Seigel
    Apr 26, 2010 at 17:54
  • 4 should have been "PROFIT!"
    – Earlz
    Apr 27, 2010 at 0:19
4

Under this plan, correction to old questions/answer that have already been edited a few times don't get seen by the community. Yuck. This is bad all by itself. Shog's plan makes it even worse.

Put me down as against.

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0

Questions with edits and new answers going to the top of the homepage is very important so that we shine the light of visibility on any changes in the system.

Just refer to my answer in this post:

SO is too eager to turn my edited answers into Community Wiki

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2
  • What about just not making CW? As the second link in my post states, there are several other ways to cheat the system and bump the questions up
    – samuelcarrijo
    Apr 27, 2010 at 15:44
  • @samuel not really -- if you're going to go to the trouble of creating puppet accounts, then you can create all kinds of havoc not limited to that. Also you risk permanent deletion. It's basically advocating "crime" as a "workaround".
    – Jeff Atwood
    Apr 27, 2010 at 23:36

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