7

A user recently made an edit suggestion to a post:

https://stackoverflow.com/suggested-edits/66907

He lost an edit race, and the difference between his edit and the edit that won the race looked silly. So I rejected it.

But I don't want my rejection to effect this user's ability to make future edit suggestions.

I've seen this case come up three or four times before, and each time I don't want to accept the edit, because what is left over is often noise, but I also don't want that user to be locked out from making edits.

Am I worried about nothing? Or is the threshold between "can make edit suggestions" and "cannot make edit suggestions" thin enough that this is a potential problem?

|improve this question
  • I had the same problem here: stackoverflow.com/posts/6487505/revisions. You can see for yourself what happened. I chose to "improve" the suggested edit and "improved it to" an older version. I also fixed the title while I was at it. – thirtydot Jun 27 '11 at 10:36
5

When some edit suggestions are rejected, the user cannot suggest any further edits until a week has passed.

You should not accept a suggestion just to allow the user to suggest more edits. If the edit doesn't contribute to make the question/answer clearer, then you should not accept it, or at least you should not be conditioned from the fact that the user could not be allowed to suggest more edits until a week is passed.

The suggestions that are shown when editing a post are the following:

  • fix grammatical or spelling errors
  • clarify meaning without changing it
  • correct minor mistakes
  • add related resources or links
  • always respect the original author

Those suggestions should be a guideline when accepting a suggested edit.

When you see the suggested edit corrects a spelling error, but leaves other spelling errors as they are, you have two options:

  • reject the suggested edit
  • improve the suggested edit
|improve this answer
  • 2
    The user in question made a gigantically good change and one minor change. Another user made the same gigantically good change and won the race. Only the minor addition [Edited to format code] remained. (Which, oddly enough, has been Accepted as an edit since I posted this question.) I'm just hoping that one or two Rejections per day won't forbid this user from making future excellent edit suggestions. How many is "some"? :) – sarnold Jun 27 '11 at 7:24
  • 2
    @sarnold In that case, I think it is not considered a rejection. If the first user would have completed the suggestion before the second user clicked on the edit link, then the second user would not have seen the edit link. When there is already a suggestion, users who can just suggest edits are not able to make another suggestion for that post. I know it because it happened to me too, and I was not understanding why sometimes I was able to see the edit button, and sometimes not. – kiamlaluno Jun 27 '11 at 7:30

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .