Spelling and grammar edits are always useful and should be encouraged, not rejected for not being more substantive. If someone is willing to take the time to make the content here more readable, we shouldn't throw away their effort just because there is more that could have been done to the post.

I do understand the impulse of the reviewer. Because low-rep users get a 2-point bump for accepted edits, there is an issue with silly minor edits being suggested solely for the easy rep. However, if there is a good-faith effort to improve the readability of the post, as in this case, reviewers should accept or improve the edit.

Spelling and grammar edits are always useful and should be encouraged, not rejected for not being more substantive. If someone is willing to take the time to make the content here more readable, we shouldn't throw away their effort just because there is more that could have been done to the post.

I do understand the impulse of the reviewer. Because low-rep users get a 2-point bump for accepted edits, there is an issue with silly minor edits being suggested solely for the easy rep. However, if there is a good-faith effort to improve the readability of the post, as in this case, reviewers should accept or improve the edit.

That said, some of the convoluted reasoning I'm seeing bandied in support of rejecting edits makes me think we need to take a moment to revisit first principles.

Why is there a suggested edits review queue in the first place?

All edits suggested by sub-2,000-rep users are placed in the review queue. What would happen if these edits were not reviewed before being published?

Well, there are a number of possible bad outcomes:

• Posts could be vandalized, by insertion and/or deletion.
• New users could change the entire meaning of posts and even make them incorrect or inaccurate.
• Spammers could surreptitiously insert promotional or malignant links into random posts.
• Editors could introduce new spelling/grammatical/formatting errors to posts that make them harder to read.
• New users could mistakenly use edits to post a new question or answer.

Without a review queue, all these changes would remain as long as no one flagged them or fixed them. This could be very bad for the site's content.

Notice that this list of very bad outcomes does not include a user fixing one or two things in a post with lots of problems. That's because the outcome of this is a marginal good, not harm to the site or its content.

While the primary purpose of the review queue is to prevent harmful edits, there is an additional knock-on effect of the review queue as well -- posts that low-rep users have identified as having problems are guaranteed to be seen by at least one high-rep user. Ideally, after the high-rep user has reviewed the post and the suggested changes, the published final product will be in good shape (or will be closed/deleted if the problems go beyond editing). In other words, once a post is identified as having problems, it will be fixed -- either by the original editor, by the reviewer, or by some combination of the two. Posts that leave the review queue should not need to come back for more.

Now, suppose the reviewer has a different philosophy of reviewing suggested edits than I do -- where edits must be complete OR ELSE. It's pretty clear what the "else" should be: the reviewer should fix the remaining problems with the post.

There are two ways for the reviewer to do this:

• Improve Post (pat on the back: I'll take it from here), or
• Reject and Edit (angry finger wag: Why are you making me do this?).

In either case, the post is fixed when it leaves the review queue. Please try to keep this in mind when reviewing suggested edits.