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A lot of the badges on Stack Overflow are aimed at firsts for activities that contribute to the site. First edit/flag/question, etc.

There doesn't appear to be a badge for reviewing other peoples' edits (and approving, rejecting, and improving) them. The badge could either be bronze (and linked to the first review), or a different colour and linked to a certain number of reviews...

My initial thoughts are something like 'ProofReader' for the badge name, there may be better options.

It could be that people feel this is already covered by the editing badges, but I thought I'd put it out there...

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  • +1, however, if posts requiring editing is extremely large (gets worse as site usage grows), time may well be better spent in editing unedited posts than reviewing edits
    – davidsleeps
    Commented May 10, 2011 at 9:21
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    While you can review edits starting at 2000 reputation, it's not until 10000 that you actually can easily find edits to review.
    – Grace Note StaffMod
    Commented May 10, 2011 at 9:30
  • +1 Nice idea. That's a lot of work, sometimes.
    – Lukas Eder
    Commented May 10, 2011 at 11:50
  • Similar, though not entirely identical, to my suggestion here: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/77042/…
    – Oak
    Commented Aug 6, 2011 at 11:13
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    Aha, implemented today? Was a bit surprised to get a badge for 100 approvals after processing 1000!
    – Bo Persson
    Commented Aug 6, 2011 at 12:39

4 Answers 4

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This is now implemented: the Proofreader badge (bronze) is awarded for having reviewed 100 suggested edits.

At the time of its introduction, 333 users earned this badge on Stack Overflow. For comparison, 8 users earned it on Super User, 7 on Server Fault, and 2 on Meta. Looking around 2.0, most launched sites have up to a handful at the moment.

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  • 5
    Awesome! Can you do a silver one for (picks a number out of the air) a thousand? I must be getting up to that level; I seem to do nothing but hit limits on number of edits I can vote on these days…
    – Donal Fellows
    Commented Aug 7, 2011 at 16:57
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    @DonalFellows I can't do anything, only Stack Exchange developers can. If you want an extra badge, make another feature request. I'm a bit skeptical that it'll be accepted, considering only Stack Overflow would have enough suggested edits to sustain it.
    – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
    Commented Aug 7, 2011 at 23:24
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This isn't a bad idea. Badges are supposed to encourage positive behaviour. And reviewing other peoples edits is positive behaviour.

But because there are already a lot of badges, a single bronze badge is possibly enough.

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  • I tend to agree about the bronze badge, otherwise I can see 'clicking improve', being linked to helping you to much on the way to a 'copy editor' badge...
    – forsvarir
    Commented May 10, 2011 at 9:21
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    Disagree about the bronze badge - i wouldn't bother getting out of bed for that :)
    – slugster
    Commented May 10, 2011 at 10:39
  • @slugster: I think it's a bit like bringing up kids... if you give them a little incentive early it can shape their behaviour... but by the time they get to your rep they're a bit set in their ways ;). Bronze badges seem to be aimed more at people with a new toy, to encourage them to play in the right direction...
    – forsvarir
    Commented May 10, 2011 at 12:10
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I'm inclined to suggest that if this badge is implemented, it should:

  1. Not include "improves" as they lead towards the Copy Editor and Strunk & White badges

  2. It should be a silver badge for a non-trivial number of reviews.

  3. There could/should be a gold badge available for having reviewed N edits every M for O (e.g. 10 edits every week for 10 weeks).

  4. Only count edit approvals/rejections where the vote made concurs with that placed by the other voter (not doing this could lead to people just clicking accept, accept, accept, accept,.... on the review page).

    or

  5. Require that the users accept/reject ratio be within a certain range of the sites "average".

Just a few ideas, with 4 and 5 mainly being concerned with ensuring that non-desirable behaviour isn't encouraged by the existance of the badge.

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    I believe the "require multiple reviewers" flag is still only ticked on SO, in which case #4 would make this badge SO-specific at this time.
    – Pops
    Commented May 10, 2011 at 14:18
  • @Popular, not the end of the world I'd say. The size of Stackoverflow means we'd very quickly be able to see if the badge "held its worth" and didn't encourage negative behaviour
    – Rob
    Commented May 10, 2011 at 18:09
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Further to point #4 on Rob's answer, I would further propose that there is a trust system in place for approving the edits, much like how a user can build up flag weight when flagging something for moderator attention.

So if I make the first vote, and the next person concurs, then that is a positive weighting for my edit approval authority ™. Once I have reached a certain level then it can require just my vote to approve the edit. This system is reasonably fool-proof, as the second approver has no way to see who the first approver was.

However I disagree with the proposed badge being bronze or silver - it should be gold (with a higher threshold to reach it), as that promotes longer term positive behaviour.

I mention this because I have been quite regular with my trawling of the pending edits list (and I've voiced my opinion about it more than once). It can be a tedious job to do properly, especially when people jump in making large volumes of low quality edits, or someone has a couple of hours to spare and decides to go to town on a wiki entry that needs careful scrutiny.

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    I believe the "require multiple reviewers" flag is still only ticked on SO, in which case #4 (and, therefore, this suggestion) would make this badge SO-specific at this time.
    – Pops
    Commented May 10, 2011 at 14:18

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