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This is a suggestion similar to the one put forward here

but with different mechanics, so I'm posting it separately.

I moderate Russian.SE, and due to the nature of the site most authors are not native English speakers. We have several users that don't ask or answer much, but spend a lot of time on copy-editing the posts (mainly, correcting grammar, transcribing text from the images, improving formatting, and editing tags).

I am extremely grateful for their work, yet I still feel it's unfair that a copy-edit completely hides the original author.

Right now, our frontpage looks like this: (original)

A zoomed out view of Russian.SE frontpage, out of 48 posts, 41 are marked as "modified" by one user (red rectangle), 2 are marked as "modified" by another user (green rectangle), 5 are "asked", "answered" or "modified" by miscellaneous other users.

All the edits marked with the red and the green rectangles were made by just two users, and most of them are copy-edits, making the message more clear but (as a rule) not adding any pieces of information that were not initially there. Yet, the name of the original poster of the last answer is hidden from the front page, you have to click into the post to see it.

Copy-editing is a very important work which definitely makes the content better, be it that of a book, a newspaper article or a Stack Exchange post. That's one of the reasons I don't like the word "minor" in the original proposal. It's not minor, and some of copy-edits are really extensive.

With books and articles, the author's name is featured on the cover or in the headline, not the copy-editor's. I feel it should be the same way for the posts on the frontpage.

Proposal:

Add an option to mark an edit as a "copy-edit" (overridable by the moderator, also possibly by a popular vote).

Copy-edits would still cause the post to be bumped, but not change the user shown beneath the post on the front page and in filters:

Frontpage with topmost post marked as "answered". A draw-in red arrow point to this post and says "This post has been since copy-edited by Relentless Copy-Editor, but the original poster's nick and stats still show here"

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  • 5
    No. It's important to know a question or answer was edited, and your suggestion would lead to losing that info. Even high rep users can make bad edits, and people better have easy way to see something was edited, and take a look. If anything, better show both, the last actual author and the last editor. How to design this is above my paycheck though.
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented Jun 1, 2023 at 19:56
  • @ShadowTheSpringWizard: that was my concern as well, but I didn't know how to design it either. Maybe "answered 5 years ago (copyedited 2 hours ago)"? That's a mouthful though
    – Quassnoi
    Commented Jun 1, 2023 at 21:16
  • System can't know reason for edit, should also show both avatars etc. Maybe one to the right, one to the left... not sure.
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented Jun 2, 2023 at 5:17
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    @ShadowTheSpringWizard: how do you mean "can't know the reason"? The whole proposal is about adding a checkbox to the edit page saying "it's a copyedit", so that it kinda can and will know the reason
    – Quassnoi
    Commented Jun 2, 2023 at 5:26
  • Well it's also useful to know who edited anyway, so my "suggestion" removes the need for checkbox and making the system more complex. It's just design change, with existing information. That's, in theory, is more likely to be actually done.
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented Jun 2, 2023 at 5:31
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    @ShadowTheSpringWizard: it's definitely useful to know who edited if the edit is adding new information to the post. My point is if the edit is just fixing formating, grammar, or tags, it should bump the post but it should not hide the name of the person who gave the accepted answer (or the best answer so far). It looks like they are into LLMs these days, and if there's one thing LLMs can do well it's figuring out if the edit is adding new information to the post or improving the presentation, so basically filling out that checkbox
    – Quassnoi
    Commented Jun 2, 2023 at 5:47
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    Side note: While many of the Red Rectangle's edits are good, there are some that are just bad editing; I doubt they would pass a review as they deviate from the original intent and/or are completely unnecessary.
    – Elements In Space
    Commented Jun 2, 2023 at 13:33
  • At least for me, the fact that the bump is caused by an edit and who made that edit are valuable pieces of information. I agree that it's also useful to show what the past post was (the question or an answer). However, showing both could get confusing when the edit isn't on the most recent post. I'm not adverse to additions to what's shown in these lists, but I do disagree with effectively hiding the most recent activity and/or user who made the last action. Even if it's not the intent of this feature request, the suggested formatting does hide information which is currently displayed.
    – Makyen
    Commented Jun 3, 2023 at 17:22
  • @Quassnoi I suggest you post this idea (or a something similar using the idea in the answer below) and/or links to this post, as an answer to this recent question: Seeking your input on redesigning our post summary component
    – Elements In Space
    Commented Aug 20, 2023 at 18:46
  • @ElementsinSpace: meta.stackexchange.com/a/392434/132020, please feel free to improve
    – Quassnoi
    Commented Aug 21, 2023 at 14:32

1 Answer 1

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The key thing to note here is that this becomes a much more serious problem in extreme cases like the screenshot above. A homepage where all the questions have the same handful of usernames listed does give the false impression that the site doesn't have many users. Most sites either have too many incoming questions or too few editors with that level of dedication to see this sort of problem, though. In that sense, this is probably too isolated of a problem to warrant a network-wide change.

There is still merit to the underlying request, though. Many people use the asker's reputation as an indication of the likely quality of the question, so a low-rep editor being listed next to a high-rep user's question could reduce the number of people that read it (or the other way around). Ideally, we'd be able to show both the poster and the editor, like you get on the question itself. The best I could hack together on short notice is something like this:

enter image description here

It preserves the asker's full identity (and in the same location as with non-edited questions, for better visual scanning) while still clearly marking the question as edited (and by who). In this specific case, it also makes it clear that this is a new edit to a two-year-old question.

The hard part, of course, is that the question feed screen is already rather dense and doesn't have a lot of room to spare. A narrow screen may not have space for that extra information without causing wrapping issues. There are a number of things you could do to save space: omit times for dates more than a week old, condense the editor's portion down to "[pencil icon] [user icon][username] [x mins ago]", show only a "edited" pencil icon and put the details in a tooltip, etc. Mobile view will likely be your downfall, though, since some of those screens are just so dang skinny.

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  • I swear there's an existing feature request to always show the asker on the home page just like this; I just can't find it at the moment. I like the use of space here a lot!
    – zcoop98
    Commented Jun 2, 2023 at 17:38
  • As far as implementation is concerned, I just copied the 'div' that wrapped the editor name/avatar block, pasted it immediately after the existing block, and updated the text/links to the author's information. All the spacing/alignment was handled by the existing styles.
    – bta
    Commented Jun 2, 2023 at 18:26

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