Today I opened the homepage and saw this:
and here's one of the edits:
I was wondering whether this kind of editing spree was appropriate.
The pictured edit occurred to a question that had not been touched for 11 years before this.
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On a side note, behaviour is the British English spelling for the American English word "behavior". This edit is not necessary. It was probably not done out of malice. When I was younger (much younger) I didn't realize that British and American English had so many differences. Others might have the same assumptions as well. It's a learning experience.– Greg BurghardtJan 17 at 19:42
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The pictured edit seems to make the question worse, not better.– user16217248Mar 28 at 2:35
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1 Answer
Some of the minor edits appear valid, while others don't. I looked at the questions referred to in the original post (I'm not sure if there are others captured in the screenshot - I didn't dig too deep into the user's history). Of the 7 posts that were edited that caused those questions to be bumped, 5 are questionable edits.
We, as a community, expect that any editing improves the readability, understandability, or discoverability (such as by search) of a question or answer. There are several edits that make changes that don't appear to make any visible improvements and a few that introduce new grammatical errors to the post.
Editing a small handful (there's no hard number, but I'd say 12-15 is the maximum, fewer is better without good reason) of posts at once, even older posts, is fine. However, the edits should also be valuable. Having 2 out of 7 edits be useful or valuable doesn't quite cut it.
answered Jan 11 at 10:49
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@Ewan Because that's how the system works. My understanding is that it gets eyes on it. By putting it at the top of the active questions, people would click through and if they see anything bad happening, they'd make further edits or cast votes and flags on the content. I think it's been raised about better ways to handle this, but they've been declined in the past.– Thomas Owens ModMar 8 at 15:27
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Is the implication that the user in question edited a bunch of posts in order to bump them rather than to improve them?– EwanMar 8 at 15:35
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@Ewan No. I don't think the intention was to bump them. I think the intention was to make them better. However, not all edits achieved that goal. It may not have been obvious that editing posts would bump them, either. Because of the bumping, the threshold for making an edit to an old post should be higher than an edit to a new or otherwise edited post and edits should be done in a manner that doesn't flood the homepage, but not everyone is aware of how the system works and these customs.– Thomas Owens ModMar 8 at 15:42