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When you edit a page on a site where you don't have enough rep to edit without needing approval, it says this:

Your edit will be placed in a queue until it is peer reviewed.

We welcome edits that make the post easier to understand and more valuable for readers. Because community members review edits, please try to make the post substantially better than how you found it, for example, by fixing grammar or adding additional resources and hyperlinks.

Also:

How to Edit

  • Correct minor typos or mistakes
  • Clarify meaning without changing it
  • Add related resources or links
  • Always respect the author’s intent
  • Don’t use edits to reply to the author

This specifically encourages "[c]orrect[ing] minor typos or mistakes," and gives no indication that this shouldn't be done in large volumes. If I didn't know better, I would think that fixing typos on as many pages as possible would be seen as constructive; there is certainly no indication that it is discouraged. This might be obvious to established users, but to anyone else, it is not at all clear. Most new users probably don't even know that edited pages go to the home screen, and even if they do, it's not obvious that that's bad.

It does say to "make the post substantially better than how you found it," but specifically listing "[c]orrect[ing] minor typos or mistakes" as a useful type of edit implies that these edits are considered to substantially improve the post.

Should the edit page indicate that large volumes of edits are not desirable?

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  • 10
    Low-rep users usually aren't the problem. They can only suggest 5 edits and then have to wait for those to be approved, which makes it impractical for them to flood the front page. It's users who can edit without review that get over-eager editing. Of course, an ideal system would allow us to have a workable front page AND as many edits as necessary.
    – Laurel
    Commented Jul 30, 2023 at 17:03
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    The "Correct minor typos or mistakes" bit, I think, is not meant to say "hey, do as many of the most minor edits you can possibly do." It is more about "hey, don't completely change the author's intent by rewriting their sentences."
    – Stuck at 1337
    Commented Jul 30, 2023 at 17:33
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    @Stuckat1337 that may be the intent, but it's not an unreasonable interpretation to think it is saying "an edit only fixing minor mistakes is helpful," and there is no indication that the volume of edits should be limited.
    – Someone
    Commented Jul 30, 2023 at 17:35
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    As Laurel said, low-rep and users who need approval to get their edits published - and can only have a few waiting for approval a time - are really not a problem. The guardrails are already there to limit their impact. And I don't see "high volumes of edits" as a problem in general, either. If lots of posts are getting "substantially improved" then I think that is a good thing. Why don't you? Do you have examples of high volumes of insubstantial edits that are causing a problem?
    – Stuck at 1337
    Commented Jul 30, 2023 at 17:35
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    Do you have evidence that your interpretation of that single bullet point is directly leading to a large volume of edits that are just minor typos? Also, there is nothing wrong with fixing minor typos along with other improvements, and there is nothing wrong with large volumes of edits, either.
    – Stuck at 1337
    Commented Jul 30, 2023 at 17:52
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    If a user makes a ton of minor edits, and these edits, while minor, actually improve the posts, what's the problem? It only takes a second or two to approve or skip an edit if you don't feel able to assess it quickly and accurately. How large are "large volumes", exactly? Do we have a problem with edit reviewers being overwhelmed, strike aside? If a user makes 500 edits that are all good, and those edits happen to take awhile to get processed, that also seems like a non-issue--I don't see any issue with them sitting in the queue for a bit.
    – ggorlen
    Commented Jul 30, 2023 at 22:41
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    An edit fixing a minor mistake is useful. Yes, it's annoying when there are more things in the post that should have been fixed but weren't, but if a couple of typos are all that's wrong, then a minor edit fixing them is useful. You seem to be assuming this is not the case. Why?
    – terdon
    Commented Jul 31, 2023 at 6:00
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    @terdononstrike Agreed. On Stack Overflow, I made this argument at length (among other things).
    – Karl Knechtel
    Commented Jul 31, 2023 at 11:18

1 Answer 1

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To address some of the discussion in the comments, I can confirm that this causes some concerns, especially on smaller sites.

Background

In more detail, I have had a personal project to reach 125 rep on all sites across the network (humor me) and have mainly been pursuing this by submitting suggested edits. Based on feedback on multiple sites, I scaled down this activity to maximum three edits per batch, and maximum one batch per week on any one site. Even then, a mod on one of the smaller sites asked me to avoid editing posts which were too old to already appear on the site's main page.

(To find posts to edit, I search for common typos; I try to target posts with many views or recent activity, but on smaller sites, I decided "recent" would mean "in the last year" to find posts with obvious typos and significant traffic. Needless to say, I tried to take care to fix more than just the obvious typos.)

Proposal

Add the following paragraphs (boldfaced here for emphasis) to the guidance which is displayed while you are editing:

Your edit will be placed in a queue until it is peer reviewed.

We welcome edits that make the post easier to understand and more valuable for readers. Because community members review edits, please try to make the post substantially better than how you found it, for example, by fixing grammar or adding additional resources and hyperlinks.

To help reviewers make sense of your edit, please remember to include an edit summary explaining what you changed and why.

Notice that if your edit is approved, it will draw new attention to this post by pushing it back to the site's front page. To avoid that, you might want to leave a comment to explain what's wrong with the post instead.

(Wording changes probably necessary. Do we call the root page "front page" or "main page" or "start page"?)

The guidance to fill in the edit summary is unrelated to the topic here, but something I have observed from review queues is not widely obeyed or understood by new editors.

Also, perhaps reorder the bullet points displayed underneath the edit box to move minor edits last:

How to Edit

  • Clarify meaning without changing it
  • Add related resources or links
  • Always respect the author’s intent
  • Don’t use edits to reply to the author
  • Correct minor typos or mistakes

(Italics added to highlight the moved text.)

Alternatively, just drop the last bullet point? Or change it to something like

  • Take care to correct all the problems you find, including minor typos
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  • "Notice that if your edit is approved, it will draw new attention to this post by pushing it back to the site's front page. To avoid that, you might want to leave a comment to explain what's wrong with the post instead." - but... this is just the same problem with extra steps. Anyone else might come along and agree that the trivial issue should be fixed. It's no good if everyone wants to fix it, but nobody will take initiative because nobody wants to be rude and bump the thing.
    – Karl Knechtel
    Commented Jul 31, 2023 at 23:59
  • I think this is a technical problem requiring a technical solution. Yes, we need eyes on "minor" edits. But no, they don't have to disrupt people who aren't usually curators. We should have more control over it than just bumping every edit to the front page, especially given that review queues already also exist.
    – Karl Knechtel
    Commented Aug 1, 2023 at 0:00
  • "The guidance to fill in the edit summary is unrelated to the topic here, but something I have observed from review queues is not widely obeyed or understood by new editors." I think most people think the purpose of their edit is self-evident. And frankly, I have seen a ton of edits with useless summaries like "improved the post".
    – Karl Knechtel
    Commented Aug 1, 2023 at 0:01
  • Yeah, the useless summaries are what I'm getting at. I've also seen troubling amounts of edits where the summary says "grammar fixes" (more often than not misspelling the first word) when the actual change modified the code or made other much more intrusive and potentially breaking changes, as well as of course many edits which I refused to approve without a proper explanation of why the edit should be made.
    – tripleee
    Commented Aug 1, 2023 at 11:11
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    The problem with a mechanism for minor edits is that they can then be abused to smuggle in significant edits with less visibility. But yeah, that could be a solution if it were implemented with proper guardrails.
    – tripleee
    Commented Aug 1, 2023 at 11:14

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