I am sure this must have been asked quite a lot of times, but I am unable to find something about the guidelines the Community uses when approving / rejecting edits.  I just fixed a first question to be a bit more appealing, yet  was immediately rejected by the Community. I can live with that, but I was wondering what rules the Community user applies when looking at edits.  Any documents explaining that?
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Why does the Community user sometimes approve or reject edits? How does a machine know if my edit is valid? What does it mean if my edit was rejected by Community?     See also:
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When new users edit a post, the review is posted to a review queue and other reputable users can review the edit and choose to approve or reject it. However, I feel that a lot of people do it pretty quickly.    to . He was fixing broken links in the answer, and as soon as I saw it I knew it would have been a good edit. However, only one reviewer found so, and three others rejected it. I ended up manually doing the edit, and poor Onato didn't get any credit for it (in fact, he got an undeserved 'rejected' for it).  The point I want to bring is that, first and foremost, the person who wrote the answer probably knows best if an edit is acceptable or not. Could there be a time frame where the author of the answer (or question) can overturn a review decision?    EDIT: one more  was rejected by overeager reviewers as well. I absolutely disagree with the notion that the community knows better. The community repeatedly proves that it only wants Internet points.    EDIT: I told a commenter to fix something himself in one of my posts, but . I went back and applied the changes myself. It's not credited to him and his stats got a rejected edit now (which really should be an approved edit). The reason ("This edit is incorrect or an attempt to reply to or comment on the existing post") is blatantly wrong and shows once more that the community has much less insight into edit quality than the people who wrote the answers in the first place. It's true that the UI didn't make it easy for them, but those guys clearly didn't read the comment thread; I did, because as the author, I was notified.    EDIT: This time around, a user fixed a blatant (though small) mistake in one of my accepted answers. One hour later, another, unrelated 10k user , even though it had been approved by the community. I went back to undo his undo.  This goes on again to show that an active user is the best judge for the quality of an edit, and that since I can have the last word on edits on my own posts, I should be allowed to retroactively overturn a community edit vote and accordingly credit the person who proposed the change.    EDIT I wrote a  years ago. Some guy found it and tried to fix it but the community thought that it wasn't worth it. I think that the changes are great and once more I'll integrate them by myself into my post. Unfortunately for this user, he won't be credited for it. I still don't understand why I can't have a binding vote on edits on my posts.
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Just read a couple MSO posts about editing guidelines, after seeing  getting rejected.  I had stumbled upon an old question that somehow made it onto the front page, and saw a great answer there. The question was about "understanding events and event handlers in C#", and the answer was great but there was further information in the comments.  So I started editing the post; I found that "if we create a delegate void MyDelegate(object sender, EventArgs e)" was clearer if the backtick encompassed the delegate word, so I moved it.  A commenter was asking "How is the event fired?", and the answerer replied with a comment instead of editing his answer, so I added a code snippet to give an example of how the event would be fired.  Then I noticed the code block actually included two parts that really belonged in two separate classes (the one where the event is created, and the one where the event is registered/handled), so I split the definition and the consumption of the event into two code blocks. That made it much clearer what belonged where, even though there weren't any classes involved (didn't add any).  And then I added the part why I actually wanted to edit the post in the first place: I added the shorthand notation for registering events: myObj.SomethingHappened += HandleSomethingHappened;. I left the full notation in place.  And lastly I added a line of code to show how a handler could be unregistered with -=.  As the first reviewer approved the edit, I thought to myself "hmm this last paragraph I added to introduce the -= really just restates the previous one from the original author" - shortly after that, my edit was rejected by 3 reviewers in a row.  The reason was "This edit is incorrect or an attempt to reply to or comment on the existing post." -- really? Is this how constructive edits are being welcomed? Have I introduced bad code that's just plain wrong? I mean, I use the shorthand notation all the time, I know it's correct. The -= part was just added for the sake of completeness, and the backtick would have been too minor of an edit. Reordering the code snippets and splitting them in two distinct blocks really improves the post I find, but someone who just glanced at the diff could think I removed the event handler snippet, when I merely cut it &amp; pasted it below the event registration code.  So I'm guessing the redundant paragraph killed it? Should I submit another edit, minus that paragraph? Actually I don't even care, it's a question from 2009 with almost 60K views and the answer is great enough as it is to have received 155 upvotes (plus mine), and if people don't know they don't need to new up the delegate to register the event then they can just buy ReSharper and have the tool teach them it's redundant. And if they want to unregister a handler then they can certainly find how to do that somewhere else. And maybe I should be doing something else to kill my spare time than browsing SO and upvoting good questions and answers, downvoting and flagging bad ones, and improve the few posts I can contribute to with the few things I do know. I mean, I intended to genuinely improve an excellent post, it's a bit (quite) irritating to read it's an "incorrect" edit.  I take the [Reject] edits that change an answer's explanation or code, with a supposedly "better" alternative. Even if the proposed solution is better, it should be added as a comment, or a separate answer. guideline as what caused my edit to be rejected. Point is, I was adding information to the answer, not changing or replacing anything.  So, was this edit legit? If I understand  correctly, my edit should have been rejected for changing too much of the post, not for being incorrect or an attempt to comment on the answer. And if Servy's MSO answer is still right, it means I should have posted my content as a brand new answer... to a question that's like 4 years old? , but I find it would have been better to just edit the post, given that "Edits are expected to be substantial and to leave the post better than you found it."  Sorry for the long post.
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Contradicting Instructions While going through the suggested edits review queue, one sometimes stumbles upon partially useful edits like . Trying to follow the instructions listed in the descriptions doesn't lead to a conclusive answer. Considering our example:   Approve edits that clearly improve the post ↳ No, not *clearly* Improve Edit when you can make additional improvements to the post ↳ I most definitively can Reject and Edit to replace an ineffective edit with your own substantive changes ↳ It is ineffective in the sense that it made the post worse overall (imho) Reject edits that fail to improve the post or that make it worse ↳ Like the last option: yes Skip if you are not sure and want to go to the next suggested edit ↳ Well, yes. But that is really why I am here, asking this question   Reasoning about the remaining Choices This leaves us with three choices: Improve Edit, Reject and Edit and Reject (the last one slightly modified):  Improve Edit  + Acknowledges that some things in the edit where correct - Learning effect for author might vanish, as the improvement might get overlooked - Can't leave a custom message for edit author (except in comments, which pollutes the thread) - Doesn't trigger the system which &quot;punishes&quot; users who repeatedly have their edits rejected - Rewards the edit author with reputation for a poor edit   Reject and Edit  + Clearly shows the author that there were problems with the edit - Still can't leave a custom message explaining the problems of the original post. - One has to partially redo parts of the edit that have just been rejected, which might feel unjust to the original editor   Reject with a custom note and come back immediately to make a good Edit  + Clearly shows the author that there were problems with the edit + Possibility to leave an explanation as to what was wrong with the edit - One still has to redo parts of the edit that has just been rejected - Seems to be a weird workaround for Reject and Edit   Something else?   Each of the three options come with their distinct advantages/disadvantages making it non trivial to decide which one to pick.  Or does the answer simply depend on the quality of the edit? Like:  Improve Edit for subjectively slightly positive edits Reject and Edit (Or Reject and Edit) for subjectively slightly negative edits
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Is there any way to view rejected edit source?  I have recently suggested an edit which was rejected. All three reviewers decided it better be a comment or an answer. So, how does one find rejected edit source in order to not type everything from scratch especially formatting, citations and links?  Fortunately after seeing first reject I navigated to mine-edited answer, which still displayed my edits, allowing me via edit link obtain source code of my edit.  Now that my edit was rejected it is impossible to obtain its source from any UI. "Suggested Edits" view has only "rendered output" and "markdown" selectors. Although I must admit, markdown diff is good as last resort, it is not good enough. To be more specific, it does not allow easy copying as selection originally started at suggested edit tends to eventually grab original paragraphs if diff is complex.    Searching the Meta similar question was found:  Alas the answer there does not provide any hint on obtaining the source of suggested edit. Thus the answer there could be satisfactory for the problem raised there, but cannot address the issue in this question, so it is not a duplicate.  In the end, if this is not implemented yet, I'm asking to implement a view to see the raw source of suggested edits.
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I was on the Suggested Edit's review tab today, and noticed that this user (take a look at today's ), was putting in hundreds of edits adding the C# tag to questions that didn't really need it. He got over 275 reputation today.   To me, this looked like spamming the edit system to get reputation. I started rejecting them as too minor, with also a custom message telling him this.   Here's one example:  Another:  Another:    And about 20-30 more. I hit my review cap for the day.  Is this valid editing behavior, and, if not, would a mod please get involved?  UPDATE: I've seen a couple of other meta questions about this in the last day, but it looks like the spike in gaming the system is passed.
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As  and described in :      [The team is] planning to open the floodgates and allow everybody to submit content edits on posts   Am I the only one who sees this undesirable? In fact, the more I think about it the more I think it has the possibility to be a really bad idea.   I think that, to provide good edits, you must have a good idea of how the site works. I am very afraid that if you give everyone the power to edit, we'll get a lot of low quality edits. The /review link was just added to help weed out low quality questions and answers... if there's a need for such a facility for questions and answers, why do we believe that edits will be much different?  I understand that these edits will have to be approved by the community:     2 Users with N reputation will have to approve each edit. There may be a capped reputation incentive (at the moment we are thinking you can get up to 1000 points 2 at a time for good edits) – waffles♦ yesterday   But I think that this potentially doubles the work for people (like myself) who like to edit. Now, instead of just doing the edits ourselves, we have to review someone else's edits and it now takes two users to approve the edit another user made, so what could previously have been done with one user now takes three.  There's another consequence to this:     @Robert ... this helps fight information rot... so many old questions need TLC. pending edit will block further edits and be actionable inline. – waffles♦ 23 hours ago   So, if I understand that correctly, that means that if some low-rep user makes a bad edit, A higher rep user can't correct it until a second higher rep user concurs the first edit was bad?  Or even if a low rep user makes a small, good edit, a higher rep user can't make a second edit until the first one is approved? I foresee all sorts of problems here.  As it stands, reaching 2,000 reputation is a great milestone on the sites. It means you have proven yourself and, most likely, you know the flow of the sites and what's good and what needs work. Congratulations, you now have the power to edit and make these sites you clearly love a better place. I think that giving editing powers to everyone greatly diminishes the privilege of being able to edit at 2k, and I think that's a bad thing.  Am I the only one who feels this way?  Is the new "everyone can edit" feature set in stone or do we, the community, have any say?
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Here's the situation- someone asks a question, accepts an answer, and then un-accepts the answer, and edits the question, making that answer and other existing answers incorrect...  I've tried to research the issue on Meta and found a few cases of this happening, the general consensus seems to be that its not appreciated and the OP should have asked a new question, but there doesn't seem to be any real mechanism or suggestion as to what to do about it.   Should these cases be flagged for an edit roll back?  Related Questions-      Note- I'd rather not reference the specific case as it would likely draw a lot of negative attention to the asker, and I think keeping it broad would help in other cases.
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Problem User submits a  which should be rejected (at least 3 reasons pop-up straight away...) You happen to come across this and you want to do the right thing, which is reject the suggested edit. So you hit Reject button and select your reason. Oops...  So then you refresh the page and click the more link to see the reviewers and stats  Right, I am not saying this is not entirely possible to come across 11/35/14 suggested edits which really improved the post... but how likely is this to happen?  UPDATE aimed at 's suggestion  which should be clear based on  Let Me Flag Currently, there isn't any way to actually flag these guys for moderators attention. I know I can go to their profiles/ activity tabs/ comments and leave a comment explaining how to act in the suggested edits queue... I can write a custom message under one of their comments and explain the problem to the mod...well, I am not going to do that.. These are painful ways of achieving something that should be exposed right there at the review stage. There needs to be another/simpler way to tell our mods and other already establish and trusted users that there are some potential robo-reviewers which need handling (possibly a ban1)  The mechanics A suggested review flag [SRV] flag's meta could be as follows (obviously just an idea)  Reviewer Link to the review Optional: reason for flagging Date/time Flagger  Each user would have a counter against his profile stored in the back end. How many times his action has been flagged, and how many times mods(10K+ possibly as well) have approved such a flag (robo-alert). This number would not be exposed to users, so nobody but the diamond mods know the raw numbers/count. If the system detects, let's say, 10 approved flags the reviewer gets an automatic ban(to be discussed). I think we could add those types of flags to the  and let those 10K+ help handle those types of flags. Any ideas are welcome as it's quite difficult for one person to invent and think throughout the entire system. Consequences Pros  slowly disposing of robo-reviewers  in a long run: improve the quality of suggested edits being approved  users awareness -&gt; &quot;my actions are somehow analyzed further&quot;   could educate users a bit more of What do I approve/reject and consequences for being a robo-reviewer.   Cons  Increased load of moderation required  Implementation of such system (developer time, etc)   1 - I am not the one to judge when a ban is necessary. It would up to the mods when someone actually deserves a ban. It could also be dependent on the amount of approved flags a reviewer has received
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When clicking &quot;edit&quot; I see:  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.  Like:     Likewise, when I am not logged in, clicking &quot;improve this question&quot; or &quot;improve this answer&quot; shows:  You are not . Your edit will be placed in a queue until it is .  And when I click 'Save', I get:  Thanks for submitting an edit. It is only visible to you until it's been approved by trusted community members  Like:     Who can suggest an edit? Where do suggested edits go? Who can vote on a suggested edit? How do suggested edits get reviewed? Can I earn reputation? What about abuse or bad edits? Sometimes the Community user approves or rejects my edit. Why is that? When can I not suggest an edit? Is there a minimum change requirement for a suggested edit? How do I check my suggested edit history? I disagree with the reasons why my suggested edit was rejected. What can I do? How do I know whether there are edits waiting for review? Someone suggested an edit to my own post, and the reviewers took the wrong action. What can I do? Are tag wikis included in this scheme? What do the &quot;Improve Edit&quot; and &quot;Reject and Edit&quot; buttons do? Why are apparently valid links to rejected edits resulting in 404 errors?   For more information about editing, see &quot;&quot; in the .
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I know this , but obviously there's still something that keeps this from being implemented/fixed.  I am a pretty active editor on Stack&nbsp;Overflow. In fact, I do edit a lot more questions than I answer. I have the Strunk-and-White badge, and if that one would stack I would have it several times by now. I am pretty high-rep — in short: I know what I'm doing.  Still.  When a question has been edited by someone whose edit needs approval, I cannot "instant-approve" his edit. Why on earth should another user be needed to approve my decision?  I know, if I go to "improve", I can overwrite the suggested edit. But that's not what I want. Especially if the edit is good, why should I take credit for it?  If I click "approve" instead, the system doesn't even let me "improve" the edit anymore. Seriously, this makes no sense at all.
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I don't know if all sites have this problem, but I suspect it extends beyond just Seasoned Advice.  Sometimes we seem to go through periods where we have a constant stream of invalid suggested edits from anonymous users. Sometimes it's blindingly obvious that the edits are not appropriate. For example, we had , where the user added the following:     Note: This is incorrect. It is protein, not fat. Use the brining technique described above to solve the problem.   ...and , where they added this:     i save my pine apple cores in the freezer in yogurt containers...till i make a turkey, i use chucks of lime, pineapple core and onion in the cavity...pineapple peelings on top of the turkey it is called armadillo turkey is is delicious....   These edits , per se. They seem like honest attempts to be helpful (one even left the comment in his edit, "just wanted to help"), and sometimes they even provide useful information, but all we can really do is reject the edit, there's  except to do a bunch of manual fact-checking and commenting/answering. And it's hard for me, personally, to understand how the users came around to the idea of suggesting an edit rather than just answering the question themselves, but somehow they did.  This is certainly nothing we can't handle on the site - we get hardly any suggested edits compared to Stack Overflow. However, it occurs to me that this could be a much bigger problem on high-traffic sites, and should also be fairly preventable.  I think it's great that anonymous users can suggest edits that correct spelling and grammar or even correct minor factual errors. But certain types of edits should be instantly recognizable as invalid when they come from anon, for example:   Edits which remove or replace more than around 50% of the content (almost always vandalism) Edits which include personal pronouns such as "my", "I", etc. Anonymous users obviously cannot speak for the original author so these edits are never valid. Edits which add a significant chunk of new content without modifying any existing content (these should most often be replies, or additional answers, similar to above)   Some of these edits, especially the last type, might be valid for Community Wiki answers.  I'm not suggesting that we actually  from anon or otherwise unless there's clear systematic evidence of spam or other abuse. As I said, I like this feature. But how about at least displaying some kind of warning to these folks while they're suggesting their edit, when they meet the above conditions? Something like:     Please consider  instead of making major changes. We want your contribution, but will not accept edits that change the meaning or attempt to reply to the original post.   They're more likely to notice this warning if it appears while they are crafting their edit, although I recognize that a lot of users won't read it anyway (just like the duplicate question warning). Still, it's better than nothing, and seems easier to implement than supporting conversion to comments/answers/etc.  It's not just about reducing noise for existing contributors. If these people have useful information, we want to try to get them to contribute it in a form we can accept, instead of having them suggest edits that just waste their time and ours. This warning would be useful for both parties, and beneficial for the site/content in general.  Thoughts?
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When I tried to edit , I got an error saying the title must be at least 15 characters.  How did this come to happen (given that it is a new question)?   Shouldn't the title written during posting also be 15 characters? Is there some text which is removed during posting which could cause this? Like tags? Maybe it's because  are still allowed in the original post?
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Just a few moments ago I was asked to review this suggested edit:   I was breaking my head thinking what was actually going on, and I wonder if this is the desired behavior of the editing system.   OP asked a question; Later on he adds and accepts an answer; After a while he changes his answer; This edit come in the review queue.   I wonder why an edit of an own answer comes in the review queue. Is there a reason for this behavior?  EDIT:  It seems this is the same user or another user sharing the same name (is that even possible). Maybe the mods can check this out?
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At the moment the reviewers are split into two camps, one is accepting minor edits, the others don't. But first, let's start with some basics:     too minor      This edit is too minor; suggested edits should be substantive improvements addressing multiple issues in the post.   And now we'll look at . In my opinion this is way too minor to be approved, but the . Though, .  From an editors point of view, it's a little bit confusing, because some people are accepting those edits, some don't...so it's pure luck based on who sees it first if it is accepted or not. In theory an editor could even do the same edit multiple times until it is accepted.  That's a very big hole of inconsistency there, which should be plugged. Either the rejection reason should be refined and clearer outlined what is "too minor" or, if those edits are valid, it should be removed altogether (because in that case minor edits are already caught by the system).
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Of course spam posts should be flagged, and if they come up in review, rejected.  Over on Mi Yodeya during the past 24 hours I’ve helped delete and reject four spam posts through the review queue, and I can only imagine that others were posted over the course of the night. To clarify, I’m referring to edits and answers that were about 99.274% words that I don’t think any decent person would use in everyday discussions, even if someone got them really angry.   Thing is, if the only thing we can do as a community is delete his posts/reject his edits, and as moderators to ban his account, can’t he just create a new account? Further, some of these posts . Maybe the mods can ban his IP address? I’m not one, so I have no idea what kind of power they wield in that respect. But he can always just get a new computer.   I don’t have the numbers to see what this is like on other sites, but I know this doesn’t happen often on Mi Yodeya. I wonder, then, whether this is the optimal solution, or whether an automatic spam filter be put into place - say, a new review queue that automatically deletes posts or rejects edits that can then be voted on whether to be reposted if it’s a false alarm. Perhaps it can be automatically triggered by certain keywords (like ****, %$#^, or @$+^).   Now, all of these posts that I voted to delete/reject came up in Suggested Edits and First Posts. Maybe such edits would show up in Low Quality in general, and that just wasn’t the case here because of precedence rules. I don’t know. But perhaps the above would be a better solution, if this is even as big of a problem as I’m making it out to be.
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The day before yesterday I reviewed  in  (I have > 2K rep there).  I clicked on “Improve Edit”, made some more changes, and saved (submitted) them.  All the changes were made (both the ones “suggested” by  and mine), and  shows two revisions — #5, by Chema, and #6, by me — made at the exact same time.   The issue is that revision #5 is shown as having been reviewed by the Community user, with no indication that I did an Improve Edit:          unlike the normal way it looks when I improve an edit:         Also, I looked at my editing stats, and they were the same before and after:        [Scott has approved 1267 edit suggestions and rejected 750 edit suggestions and improved 289 edit suggestions] Normally the third number (improved ___ edit suggestions) would go up by one. Also, it does not appear in my Review history ( → “Activity” → “all actions” → “reviews”) or .   This happens on a recurring, but occasional (irregular, irreproducible), basis.  For example, see , , and .  I did “Reject and Edit” on all three, but I didn’t “get credit” for .