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I generally don't take a strong interest in the process behind what occurs between when I suggest an edit and the edit becoming formalized. I was a bit bored today, and so I watched a little more intently the process as it occurred.

jackass

After the edit was accepted, something kinda struck me. I'm not trying to call out the specific person in question, but I'm wondering if there's some lesser issue that hasn't yet been addressed.

I don't think that some of edit checkers were unreasonable about their checks. Even an edit that introduces minor errors is easily fixed. Could the more critical checker, which has a more than 50% refusal rate, not have accepted the edit and either chosen to do nothing more or fixed it furthermore?

I don't want to call out the individual in question for purposes of sanction. On request, I will supply details about the specific instance.

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  • It'd probably be better if you linked to the edit so we can talk about specifics. I don't believe we've ever had an issue with names being mentioned on meta.
    – slhck
    Jan 23, 2015 at 7:44
  • @slhck I appreciate that you wanted details to look at the specific situation. I was trying to ask a little more broadly about the trend and pattern more than the specific case. The specifics were correctly identified by others, but I'm still more interested in the general case than my specific case.
    – killermist
    Jan 24, 2015 at 0:52

3 Answers 3

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Assuming you are talking about this edit:

This is one reason why we have majority rule in the review queues.

Looking at the review in question the edit was useful in that you saved the question from being closed as a product recommendation and so in my opinion it should have been approved as the rest of the question is not particularly poor quality.

From the other side though I personally have a very similar rejection ratio. I hate edits that are pointless grammatical changes that don't benefit anyone or similar superficial edits.

Your edit was on the borderline though. It clearly saved the question from being closed as a product recommendation, but to an extent it does conflict with the wishes of the author. He was specifically asking for a tool and you changed it to ask for a general solution instead.

I would have accepted your edit, but mainly because it essentially "does no active harm" to the question and actually prevented it from being immediately closed. I had to actually look at how you rephrased it to see that it is in fact roughly equivalent, minus the product recommendation.

I don't see any harm with a high reject ratio though. We need more people rejecting the more minor and pointless edits that do nothing more than create churn on the front page or people gaming the edit rep you get by making pointless changes to tag wikis that add no real value.

While the user who rejected your edit may certainly be more discerning, all their recent rejects seem to align well with the set of canned reject reasons that are available. Most of their recent rejections are from new users who were trying to comment on answers when they lack the reputation, perfectly fine to reject IMO.

Considering the ratios of accepted edits I'd actually be looking closer at the other users who accepted your edit and asking if they are simply accepting everything but the absolute worst edits. 1000 accepts with only 3 rejects seems a lot like robo-reviewing to me.

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    Most editors (to my possibly naive mind) are trying to improve questions or answers. "1000 accepts with only 3 rejects seems a lot like robo-reviewing to me." may be harsh. It seems like the possibility that the user sees a good quantity of edits, sees that they help-not-hurt, sees another number that hurt-not-help, and skips the others that he's not sure of. If most edits are made (as mine are) with the purpose of improving a question, beneficial, deteriorative, and "other" should be fairly clean categories. If he's "skipping" the "other" group, that doesn't seem unreasonable to me.
    – killermist
    Jan 23, 2015 at 22:56
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    @killermist it also means they could be approving edits that shouldn't be approved, we had a recent example of that, an edit that was its own complete answer was approved in error
    – Ramhound
    Jan 24, 2015 at 12:04
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    Just a heads up, the rejected edit stats are definitely off. I looked at mine the other day, and it said I had only rejected one suggested edit, which is very far from accurate.
    – Excellll
    Jan 26, 2015 at 19:01
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I don't think you should pay that much attention those statistics about how many edits a user has approved or rejected. When reviewing edits, it's often easier to be sure that an edit should be rejected than it is to be sure that it should be approved. For instance, on some days there are three or four attempts from the same spammer to nuke legitimate answers and replace them with spam and it takes half a second to decide to click reject for each one. This can rapidly increase the "rejected edits" count for a reviewer.

For the particular case you are talking about, in my opinion the edit should have been approved and ultimately it was. The edit approval system is basically a democracy where the majority opinion wins and generally it works well.

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Don't look :-) Everybody was right; it was a minor edit that changed nothing in reality, so in that respect it would not have been horribly wrong to reject it.

In the Super User reality though :-) I can see exactly what you were doing "saving the question" and totally marking what you were doing clearly in the comments in killermist style.

You have got to stop "Hey, what's that edit . . ." Gratuitous music video, Stop Hey What's that sound.

Don't sweat the small stuff, and keep up the good work. Things will work out for the most part.

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    This does not really address the question though.
    – slhck
    Jan 23, 2015 at 7:43
  • Ok then I should add that "balance" may very well be a good thing. That even in the supreme court(s) you have judges that reject change way more often, and judges that roll on through way more often, and together they make a total descision.
    – Psycogeek
    Jan 23, 2015 at 7:59
  • I love that I've made enough of a name for myself that when I make edits, reviewers can notice that, "killermist did this, he's trying to help. He probably did something positive" (in general), especially since I make absolutely certain to point out in my comments what I did and why. Acting without reason kinda ain't in my behaviour profile. My meditation may be short, depending on task, but most of my actions are some form of premeditation made manifest.
    – killermist
    Jan 24, 2015 at 1:01
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    First of all, I quibble with your terminology. The “rejection rate” of the middle user is under 36%. You should compute 71/(127+71). But, secondly, Reviewer Stats shows incorrect number of Suggested Edit rejections. My rejection rate is even higher (39%), and I suspect that most serious reviewers have similar statistics – there are a lot of really bad Suggested Edits. Feb 23, 2015 at 5:07

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