Can we give the community evangelist something more notable to make suggested edits go more smoothy?

Question

I've noticed the SE community evangelist SamtheBrand making some copy editing edits to correct the formatting of the markdown or the proper wording of a phrase. Likely to help improve our (P.SE's) image for showing us off the the world.

Currently, the community evangelist does not have a diamond and isn't a 2k+ user to be able to do free edits and so the suggested edits go through the review queue. Most of the time these have been approved because they're right.

Other times, they're rejected as 'too minor' (putting an 'a' in the title of a question, or minor rewording (IIRC, there was a suggested edit on one of my answers that was rejected that resulted in an awkward phrasing being copied out to ars technica)). This is unfortunate, because they really should go through. The motivation of this user is quite different than your normal sub 500 rep user (I think 500 is where you get cut off for rep from question edits) - he's not after rep. Thus, the minor edits are completely appropriate for what is being done and shouldn't be rejected.

So, is there something that we or SE can do to make it more obvious that these edits should go through because he isn't the normal ~200 rep user picking through old questions for rep, he's our evangelist? A +1800 association bonus from SEEmployeesOnly.SE? A diamond? Awareness of other review queue reviewers?

Answer 1

Meh.

The blame here is primarily on the reviewers, and I don't see a compelling reason for Stack Exchange employees to be privileged if Stack Exchange doesn't see fit to give them a diamond. What if I copy edited a post in preparation for sharing it in my company newsletter?

Suggested edits are not too minor if they improve the post. An edit is too minor only if what it improves is incommensurate with what the post needs. There are two subcases:

• if the suggested edit doesn't really improve anything and the original version was just as good as the proposed revision;
• if the suggested edit makes some improvements, but these are dwarfed by the improvements that the post really needs.

Making a title grammatical is not too minor if the post is otherwise not in need of an edit.

Yes, the guidance on suggested edit review comments kind of sucks.

That being said, it would help if Sam indicated that the question is of particular importance (due to being destined for 15 minutes of fame) and in need of being perfect.

Answer 2

Good to be noticed!

Indeed, I make these minor (occasionally significant) edits once a week in preparation for the week's Ask Stack column at Ars Technica.

As you know, it's easy to get hung up on a minor speling or, punctuation error. And it's important to me that the awesome questions and answers here aren't overshadowed by a trivial slip of the keyboard.

But yes. I understand that my minor edits may seem like rep mining to those who don't know me, and my behavior could conceivably train users to be bad actors. Don't act like me!

Or maybe do... I personally agree with Gilles & MichaelT that even the shortest "correct" edit is a perfectly acceptable edit. Whether minor edits should bump a question to the front page, well, that's a good question for Meta, though it's worth noting that even minor edits can be malicious edits, and thus it might make sense for all edits to get front page exposure.

Thanks for reaching out. And even more thanks for creating content that demonstrates the best of what our network, communities, and individuals have to offer.

Feel free to ping me any time in chat if you think I'm making an edit in error, being unreasonably heavy-handed, or if you just want to say hi. Going forward I'll try to be more articulate in my edit descriptions.

Slowly, I will grind my way towards 2,000 rep. Until then, I hope you approve me.

Answer 3

Generally speaking and with no offense to Sam... my initial reaction is that no, we shouldn't do anything special here.

Most employees don't require special privileges across the network. Heck, many of us aren't really using the sites and/or aren't always in tune with how individual communities work. Those of us who do have network-wide diamonds take great care to avoid abusing them or overstepping any bounds when it comes to site-specific privileges.

So, while these edits are likely good, the fact that they're made by an employee doesn't necessarily mean that they should go through any more than any other suggested edit by any other user.

That said, I'll see if others on the team (including Sam :)) disagree. We'll discuss it next week.

Answer 4

I'm going to go out on a limb here and make this answer more about minor edits than about Sam.

Unless the edit is wrong, approve it. Reviews should be 'stateless'. You look at the original, you look at the suggested and if the suggested is better, approve it. Thats it. Every improvement is an improvement on the site. There really isn't any such thing as 'too minor'.

Now, if a user is apparently abusing the edits (making lots of them on multiple questions and thus causing a disturbance), flag it. Moderators are better equipped to look into the patterns of behavior (this is what you should do if you suspect strange behavior, or odd voting patterns, or otherwise questionable behavior).

Note that I emphasized questions above. Making 5 edits to 4 answers and the question in the same question isn't any more disruptive on the front page than making one edit to one question.