Please don't make trivial edits

Question

The front page of the site was recently flooded with approximately 20-30 edits which did nothing but remove contractions from posts, e.g. changing "I'm" to "I am" and "it's" to "it is".

May I take this opportunity to remind everyone of the help centre guidance on edits:

Some common reasons to edit are:

• to fix grammatical or spelling mistakes
  • to clarify the meaning of a post without changing it
  • to correct minor mistakes or add addendums / updates as the post ages
  • to add related resources or hyperlinks

Tiny, trivial edits are discouraged - try to make the post significantly better when you edit, correcting all problems that you observe.

Whether or not to use contractions is a matter of personal style, not of correctness. If someone has made a spelling or grammatical mistake, even a very minor one like mixing up "its" and "it's", then fixing that could be a valid edit. But changing the writing style of a post written in perfectly correct English is not what edits are for. "I'm" and "I am" are equally valid.

_{PS. The front page now looks as though it's flooded with my edits, but that's only because I've been rolling back all the bad edits which just removed contractions.}

Answer 1

I agree these edits should not really be happening, but reverting them doesn't fix any problems unless the edit actually makes the post worse.

For suggested edits, by all means reject them as 'no improvement whatsoever'; we want to discourage pointless edits, and rejecting it helps to teach editors what is and isn't appropriate.

For people with the edit questions privilege, it's a little bit harder to stop trivial edits which make no improvement at all, although it is a serious problem - edits bump the post to the top of the front page, burying the new content which actually needs attention.

If someone's doing that, try giving them a ping in the comments (@editorName will work, even though the autocomplete doesn't show their name when writing a comment on a post they edited) - they may not know that it's causing a problem, and I like to think that most users are editing in good faith.

I'm not so keen on actively rolling back edits that are trivial if they are valid; this just bumps the post again and creates more of the problem we're trying to solve. If a user is doing this a lot, and won't respond to a gentle nudge in a comment, I'm sure it'd be helpful to flag this so the Community Team (or, in future, the Pro Tempore Moderators) can let the user know what's wrong.

So, what I'm trying to get at here is that rolling back trivial edits just to stop trivial edits creates a bigger problem, rather than solving it, and communication can go a long way.