Is an edit to change only "formatting" warranted on ELL?

Question

Since I joined this community, I've noticed many edits which seem to be trivial and not helpful enough to this community. The edit guidelines on ELL's help center clearly states that "tiny, trivial edits are discouraged".

For example, the second edit of the linked question, Article usage before “historical”, changes only formatting and deleted "Thanks in advance".

I can find more edits that were made just to change formatting on ELL.

Leicester is seven points ahead

1. I edited two typos, "than" from "that" and "topper" from "toppers" and didn't edit anything else as I didn't see any other issues.

2. Another user changed Spurs to Tottenham and just formatting.

3. I rolled it back because the edit seemed to be trivial and I thought it was the OP's right to call Tottenham "Spurs" and chances are low for "Spurs" to cause confusion to readers.

According to the following Post by Jeff Atwood,

The Great Edit Wars

Always respect the original author.

and

if the author of the post is resistant to your editing changes, even a perfectly legitimate edit based on the above rules, be the bigger man (or woman) and let them have it their way. Our goal here is not to cause friction between users, or to make everything perfect overnight. All we aim to do is gradually clean up and improve questions and answers together. When in doubt, just move on! There will be plenty of other posts and other edits you can make. In time, that reluctant author will learn how Stack Overflow works.

I am against those trivial edits for the following reasons:

1. A trivial edit is a distraction to moderators and other active users who need to check whether the edit is helpful or not, especially when it is made by users with more than 2,000 reputation points.

2. A trivial edit is unduly placed on top of the front page pushing away questions and answers that might need more attention. I don't think it's fair.

3. A trivial edit such as changing Spurs doesn't respect the original author.

What are your thoughts?

A side note:

1. I don't think it is a bad idea to delete "thanks" in a question, but only when there are non-trivial edits that should be made at the same time. I am against an edit just to delete "thanks".

2. In order for ELL to be a better community, (1) there should be more users who answer (or ask) questions than edit them, (2) a user should spend more time answering (or asking) than editing. Where are we? If such a trivial edit is made on English Language and Usage (ELU), I don't think it would be tolerated. Actually I rarely encounter such an edit on ELU.

Answer 1

Since you asked, I'll tell you my thoughts about this rant.

1) It's unnecessarily negative and judgmental.

Since I joined this community, I've noticed many edits which seem to be trivial and not helpful enough to this community.

Who are you to judge when an edit is "helpful enough"? If an edit improves a question, then it benefits the community. Please refrain from calling someone else's work "not helpful."

2) You've picked a bad example of a "trivial" edit.

This edit put example text in a quote box. You may regard that as "trivial," but I'd guess that most ELL regulars would regard this edit as an improvement:

Moreover, many newer users don't know much about SE protocols, preferences, and formatting tricks. Simple improvements like removing a "thanks in advance" or using a quote box can make the question look better while at the same time help an O.P. learn how to improve future questions. Since this user is a relatively new user (6 days), I would regard these nudges as helpful.

3) It contains erroneous information.

Contrary to what you say, so-called trivial edits are not "a distraction to moderators." Moderators do not run the site, the community does. Moderators are here to intervene when there are problems. Rollback wars are a problem, but improving the formatting of a new user's question is not a problem. Most edits are ultimately approved without any moderator intervention.

4) It tries to cast your axe to grind as an issue of "fairness".

Here's a timeline I am aware of, all within the last 12 hours or so:

• You were involved in at least two "rollback wars" with the user who made this (trivial?) edit.
• You were politely asked to end a heated debate in chat over this very topic.
• You were later temporarily banned from chat for reigniting the argument and making rude comments in the chat room.
• You posted this meta question in an attempt to garner support for your side of this argument.

Insofar as I can tell, other members who are approving or disapproving edits don't seem to be bothered by these "trivial" improvements. That, along with the timing of this meta question (on the heels of your rollback wars) suggest this is less about "fairness" to the community and more about you trying to win a debate.

5. Don't call us a "community" and expect complete conformity.

Your post begins with "Since I joined this community." Please, let it be that, a community. Stop imposing your standards on everyone else. If someone wants to make formatting improvements, let that be their contribution to the community.

6. Once again, you compare ELL with ELU.

Yes, ELU and ELL are sister sites, but I've grown a little tired of you comparing the two. This is not the first time you've said something along the lines of, "This would not be tolerated on ELU," or, "That's not the way this gets handled on ELU." ELL does not need to be a clone of that community; each SE community evolves on its own into its own. If you prefer the way they handle things at ELU, then spend your time there. If you are going to spend time in both places, then accept that they are not obligated to be run exactly the same.

Answer 2

[Happily, the following is now obsolete, but is left in to avoid confusion.]

According to the following Meta Post,

Are edits that only change formatting in text appropriate?

the answer clearly states that you should reject those (edits) unless they are a total eye-sore.

You have completely and totally misread the linked Meta SE guidance. That is not what it says to do at all. What Shog actually says is, when reviewing suggested edits, if the post the edit is made to is almost perfect except for a few minor formatting issues the edit corrects … it's great! That's a good edit! It should be approved! Only if the post is amazingly bad and the edit just doesn't help with the fundamental issues should it be rejected.

To that I would add the guidance often given elsewhere: if an edit is purely a matter of subjective taste (tabs vs spaces, bullet lists vs numbers, asterisk footnotes vs numbered, or the like) it's not worth making. (It's also not worth rolling back. A rollback of a trivial edit is a trivial edit itself, and just makes things worse. Rollbacks are not equivalent to edit rejections.)

The example revisions were not suggested edits, and editors with direct privileges are given more leeway to make minor changes, as the 6-character limit is removed and their edits need no specific review. What's more, both would have been perfectly acceptable even as a suggested edit under the guidance you linked to: the posts had no problems that weren't corrected by the edits. (While the confusion of quietly calling the same thing by two completely different names may not be serious, it's worth making some attempt to reduce the problem, and there really is no reason to simply let that potential confusion stand.)

It might be nice to reduce the amount of bumping from minor edits, but it's not a terribly big deal, especially if most questions get bumped a similar number of times: it all comes out in the wash. There have been various feature requests for ways to avoid bumps in certain cases, but none of them have gotten very far. Your assertion that users have to be more careful to cross-check 2k+ editors' bumps seems strange, and needs to be backed up with a strong argument.

I definitely disagree with your side note that every user needs to be posting more than editing… or indeed posting at all. Any useful contribution a user can make should be encouraged. If the site's built-in reward system for encouraging posts in particular is not enough to maintain a general level of good answers and questions, that's a large systemic problem that is not usefully addressed by discouraging edits. For myself, as a nigh-obsessive editor and occasional answerer, editing does not compete with answering: if I spent no time editing, I would actually answer fewer questions, since I wouldn't be reading as many. The result so far is about the same number of answers as you, Rathony… plus an extra thousand or so edits. That kind of benefit to the site should not be lightly discarded or discouraged in others by adherence to some artificial proportion of edits to answers or questions.

Answer 3

What. The. Heck.

I see the other answers have already covered a lot of stuff here, so I won't contribute to the skirmish. I just had a few things to point out, and it just won't fit in a comment.

Drama is bad.

It doesn't matter whether you're Batman and the other guy is The Joker, it doesn't matter whether you're normal people, or university professors, or helpless learners. What matters is that you're users, and this is a community, driven by your actions. No matter the offense of the other user, be it as bad as sock-puppetry or as abusive as vandalizing posts, you must be civil and communicative if there's the slightest chance of communication.

So if you just go on a rollback spree and mar someone else's effort and when asked for reason plug your ear and shout "trivial edits are discouraged", you are in the wrong even if what you say is according to the rules. This isn't a marathon, and we're not in the middle of a competition. We're building a useful resource for English learners around the world. Together. Let me emphasize a part of what you quoted:

if the author of the post is resistant to your editing changes, even a perfectly legitimate edit based on the above rules, be the bigger man (or woman) and let them have it their way. Our goal here is not to cause friction between users, or to make everything perfect overnight. All we aim to do is gradually clean up and improve questions and answers together. When in doubt, just move on! There will be plenty of other posts and other edits you can make. In time, that reluctant author will learn how Stack Overflow works.

Gauging Edits

Another problem here I see is that you're acting in a very binary way.

This isn't the way to go. I'm spending my time editing a question; the time that could've been spent doing something else. Thus editing is helping the site unless proven otherwise.

The only case where edits aren't useful is if they're extremely superfluous and clogging the way of meaningful contributions to the site. That is, they stop answers from different users from getting the necessary attention or useful edits to be approved in time. Neither happened in this case.

There are a lot of things you should consider when you gauge an edit useful or trivial, or harmful.

• Site: People argue that "the ELU mindset is different from ELL's". I'd actually be surprised to hear that this is what you do to trivial edits on ELU. That said, the site I'm acting on is indeed important in many of my decisions. I'm much more inclined to approve an edit that add a good tag to an ELL post compared to Chem because here we need more tag edits.
• The Impact factor: If the edit changes the post a lot, close to or more than a 60% change from what the post originally was, I become more skeptical when reviewing, and revert some of the changes.
• The post: Edits invalidate flags, and bumping a closed question standing at -5 does no one any good. So I tend to reject edits on these, with some exceptions.
• Superfluous-ness: Here's how I gauge edits' usefulness: There are three possibilities. Either the edit is acceptable (1), or unacceptable for below 2k (2), or totally unacceptable (3). The reason is obvious.
  • If an edit removes a tagline, it's either (1) or (2). If there's some other meat to it, it's (1).
  • If an edit introduces a useless tag, and/or one that hasn't been discussed on meta, it's either (2) or (3).
  • If an edit introduces new formatting, it might be the either option, though rarely 3. There's a big difference between editing a train-wreck into something readable, and changing a numbered list to an unnumbered one.
  • I honestly still don't see much consensus on editing grammar, so my advice may be argumentative-ish in these cases, but grammar edits have almost always fallen into the (1) tag for me.

Now it's obvious how we deal, or rather don't deal, with (1). (2)'s case is different. If I go on editing 100 posts on the site with a single typo removed, either I should stop or a mod should stop me. But if it's a steady flow of a few edits, no action needs to be taken. Hell, there isn't even anything to game above 2k.

The only edits that should be rolled back are those in (3). Rollback is for cases like this. Spam injections, vandalism, and extreme cases like that are when you should use that button. The reason it exists is to make reverting the harm done as fast as possible.

TL;DR; The only thing you should check is whether an edit harms the post. If it doesn't, then leave it be. The end. This isn't about you being right, or they being right. The main problem here is the fact that such a trivial issue escalated to this.

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I was so reluctant to post an answer, and I might not respond to comments. Please don't leave another trail of long comments here. I want this to end. RIGHT NOW

Answer 4

Why do you think that moderators and active users "need to check whether the edit is helpful or not"? If it's not in the review queue, it doesn't need checking. Folks with enough reputation are trusted to make edits.

If the edit doesn't

• harm the readability
• introduce an error
• change the meaning
• or misrepresent the original author's intent

and it's not in the review queue, I don't bother with it.

It's not my place to judge how other people choose to spend their time. If someone would like to make certain that all example sentences are in blockquote format, and all greetings, signatures, and other fluff has been removed, more power to them. It doesn't change the world, but it makes it a little better, and it makes them happy.

If I roll-back an edit because I think it's too trivial, I've become part of the problem because the roll-back I just did is a trivial edit. So, if you truly believe that trivial edits damage the site, you've just doubled that damage every time you roll-back an edit simply because it's trivial.

That said, I usually go back to the original revision (or an earlier revision by the author if they have done some of their own edits) and edit that instead of rolling back or trying to correct corrections of corrections if I see something that needs fixing. In my opinion, that is more useful than rolling back because I can roll-up the "trivial" fixes that other folks have made as well as my own edits into one revision so it is very clear how the post has changed from the author's writing.

Answer 5

The standard for voting against a proposed minor edit from the review queue is

This edit does not make the post even a little bit easier to read, easier to find, more accurate or more accessible. Changes are either completely superfluous or actively harm readability.

Removing thank you and other superfluous language makes the post easier to find and easier to read. Using conventional formatting such as blockquotes for quoted text and examples and italics for use/mention distinction makes the post easier to read and often more accessible.

The FAQ on editing reads

When should I edit posts?
Any time you see a post that needs improvement and are inclined to suggest an edit, you are welcome to do so. The original author of a question or answer may always edit their own post, regardless of reputation level.
Edits are expected to be substantial and to leave the post better than you found it. Common reasons for edits include:

• To fix grammar and spelling mistakes
• To clarify the meaning of the post (without changing that meaning)
• To include additional information only found in comments, so all of the information relevant to the post is contained in one place
• To correct minor mistakes or add updates as the post ages
• To add related resources or hyperlinks

These are common reasons, but not the exclusive reasons for editing. Since the StackExchange convention is to remove hi, thanks, taglines, and salutations from posts, I see no harm done.

I share your wish that there were a way to edit questions without bumping them, but that behavior seems to be a feature, not a bug.