Do we care about edit flooding? Should we be doing anything?

Question

Edit flooding is the term I'm using for when a single user (or small group of users) perform a lot of edits in a small space of time and effectively take over the front page - pushing a lot of new content away.

A few minutes ago, the front page was filled end to end with edits by one of our top editors. This is a bit of two-edged sword because the edits are all good and so are appreciated, but at the same time we are pulling eyes away from the new content on the site and making it potentially a little bit harder for new questions to get answers. Admittedly, the problem is pretty quick to self-heal, but some questions could still be slipping under the radar because of this.

• Do we care about flooding caused by good edits?
  (I'm talking direct edits here, not suggested, but consider that many of these could be to "old" questions)

• Should it be discouraged? Or ignored?

• If discouraged, how should we be doing so without discouraging the editors from doing their good work?

Answer 1

There are really two issues here

1. Edits should be reasonably substantive -- trivial edits have all the negatives but almost none of the positives. For example, the 6 character guideline we use for suggested edits is a good starting point.

2. You don't need to be too protective of the front page; remember that the questions link will show you just the newest questions and it is very prominently linked, e.g.

   http://superuser.com versus https://superuser.com/questions

Notice the difference?

I definitely do not support a "trivial edit" or "hidden edit" flag. All edits need to be vetted by the community, and hiding them is not the right way to accomplish this goal.

There should be a nice blend of bumped questions on the homepage naturally anyway:

• new questions
• questions with new answers
• answers with new edits
• questions with new edits

And so forth. If you want to see just the incoming new questions, https://superuser.com/questions is one link away.

Answer 2

For what it's worth, I'm the editor who was referred to in the question.

I derive a real sense of satisfaction from editing questions and answers on the sites, and flagging anything that falls outside of what generally makes 'good content'. Sometimes those edits are significant and almost a complete rewrite, other times they are minor but may help with categorisation or search engine ranking.

My editing spans across recent additions to the site, anything found on the various review pages, and occasionally searches. My intention is not to flood the site with as many edits as possible, but to improve things whenever I see them to help improve the site overall. For example, I might come across a user's first question that needs rewriting, and in the process discover that a lot of answers to that question could do with some editing as well. Once I've finished that might result in say, 6 edits.

I can understand concerns about the front page being flooded with question/answer revisions, but I never actively think about it when I'm editing - especially when I imagine other traffic will push my edits down the front page anyway. For new questions there is also the Questions view which doesn't include edits anyway.

I would be quite disappointed if any measures were taken to slow down the editing, because it would turn it from something I can easily do in a casual way to something I would have to actively think about - and I don't really have any desire to do that.

My preference would be for an option to remove edits from having any impact on the front page activity.

EDIT: Something clearly needs to be sorted for this. Today I was piling my way through reuploading images not hosted on i.sstatic.net - since I've seen a number of questions lately with broken images. Call it preventative action! However a few members complained in chat and asked me to stop editing, so I have for now.

Answer 3

Based on this post and some events this afternoon, me and Gareth were able to chat about this issue to some extent.

The biggest issue was that some of the edits appear to be insubstantial, and useless, from our view. What I did not realize, was that Gareth was re-uploading all the broken images that were dead from PhotoBucket. The most of the edits were clearly done well, with a few minor exceptions.

From this, my biggest problem was that we have a lot of questions on the site. When someone asks them, they plunk down on our home page. But with all these edits, it was quickly being pushed to the bottom, or right off. Now Gareth suggested I simply go to the Questions > Newest page. This is a reasonable suggestion, but it dawned on me that, like I normally do, many users probably just refresh the home page, and expect to see new questions, or updated with answers.

I think this could be resolved with studiohack's proposal on Meta.SO, which outlines that moderators can do a no-bump with edits. I think this feature should be give to top editors also, who continually put forth quality edits. Perhaps with 500+ Edits, since they would then know how to edit well, and would have the Copy Editor badge. Only 14 users have this.

Answer 4

What about implementing a time-based edit queue? For example, let's say we set the threshold to five edits, with a time delta of 10 minutes.

If you make more than five edits within a ten-minute period, all subsequent edits are sent to a queue. The edits in the queue are done immediately (the content is changed instantaneously), but they are pushed to the front page one at a time after a certain amount of time (maybe 5 minutes).

(Basically, your edits go to a queue if you exceed 5 edits in 10 minutes. After that, all edits are delayed being pushed to the front page by five minutes. Any subsequent edits, while there are still entries in the queue, are further queued.)

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Furthermore, since sometimes you want edits to your own questions/answers to appear near the top, this should only apply to edits you perform on someone else's post. If this was implemented, there would be no need to view an edit queue (except for your own), and if that particular edit was rolled back, it should be removed from the queue.

Finally, some people have worries that their "essential" edits would not be pushed to the front as quick as they would like. To mitigate this, maybe there would be a way to flag an edit as a "priority edit", so it would be put in the top of your edit queue (and would be placed on the front page in the next push interval).

Thoughts?

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Also, maybe strictly tag-edits should not be pushed to the front page (but still show up on a user's edit history, of course)? I do not think we should implement a "minor change", because as some have said, it reduces the visibility of user edits to the community. That being said, I think that just tag edits could be an exception to this rule.

Answer 5

Edit floods are based really on the traffic of your site, and how much of an impact it will cause. For example, on Stack Overflow, you could probably do a flood of 150 edits in the span of an hour, and it'll have almost no impact - the front page moves fast enough to override even that much, and the special "Interesting" view may even completely overlook these revisions. However, on many of the small Stack Exchange 2.0 sites, they don't get enough traffic to overwhelm a full front-page worth of edits (which is 50, by the way). As such, judge the appropriate frequency based on your site performance. Aaronut wrote an interesting analysis of Seasoned Advice's traffic with regards to 'edit floods', consider using that as an example of what to look at.

Super User is one of the higher performing sites so you're probably more in Stack Overflow's shoes than in a small site's. However, you also want to keep in mind, the faster a massive edit session is done, the less impact it will have on your traffic. It may overwhelm the front page for an hour, but after that hour, it could be recovered by your normal traffic very easily, with the added bonus that the edit job will be done.

You may consider that it is often wiser to perform massive edit jobs during low period hours. That way, any impact you do have on the front page, will be during a period of time when there isn't much for the revisions to take away from. As well, when the activity of the site does pick up, it'll again clear up all of the leftovers from the edit flood.

I'd say that ultimately, the biggest thing to keep in mind about an edit flood is prepare in advance for it. These should be planned efforts to maximize the amount affected while minimizing the impact on the site. Determine whether it is a tiny job of 20-30 posts that can just be done any time in the day at any rate, versus a job of 100+ that is best done overnight in one fell swoop.

To take away from it, as long as it is improving the site and not significantly detracting from your normal site activity, I'd say that such things should not be discouraged. We needn't necessarily encourage them, but I think they're fine when they work without harm. There's little that can be done post-fact other than discuss how to do it better (if there were any issues).

Answer 6

It seems that there are two issues here:

1. Is it appropriate for a "minor edit" flag to be added? Tag edits could default to this unless over-ruled, it could be smart to sense adding 50% new content or whatever, but basically let the power editors and moderators choose whether to "bump" with a specific edit or not.

2. Should users be given the filter or a lever to sort questions that were asked recently rather than edited recently.

I surely can't speak if the effort needed to implement a "minor edit" tag would pay off, but it would be a handy lever for moderators to suppress any sort of edits that were made in bad faith simply to bump a question as well as for editors that do great work at one time and didn't know or care to make an edit minor. Wikipedia has implemented the minor editing flag quite well so perhaps that might be the right solution if the problem is acute enough to the people with the checkbooks.

Anything like throttling acts against the long term health to have the best answers, no matter who or when they make the edit. Don't turn away people editing a ton of articles that need tagging, clean-up, whatever without exhausting other means to preserve a "fresh" list of questions.

Answer 7

What about a combination of Grace Note's and Breakthrough's suggestion?

Here's what I see:

1. A queue is built up after 'X' amount of posts are edited within a pre-determined time period.
   • it might be a good thing to exclude any edits that are made by the original OP in order to give users that are adding detail to their questions/answers to not be hampered.
2. If at that time the site is busy, then that queue is release over a period of time to let the edits come through, but not flood the site with traffic that will 'hide' new questions.
3. If the site is slow a higher amount of those queue edits are released if not all of them.

This is similar to what the community account already does with unanswered questions, and shouldn't be difficult to add the edits within that already made code.

Answer 8

Sounds like when the Gizmodo editors didn't post anything for a few hours after they did the iPhone 4 uncover because they wanted people to see it.

On one hand, we want recent activity to come up first, on the other, we don't want less recent activity that is more important to leave the activity feed too quickly.

Possibly a "minor edit" checkbox could be a solution?

Answer 9

A lot can go wrong in 5 characters in an English sentence. In fact, everything can go wrong in just one.

We need edits with 0 points for correcting common errors (up to three?) such as typos, grammatical errors, punctuation mistakes, etc.

Let's not get lost in the sauce: the ramifications of a mistake in an English sentence are not measured by the length of the error.