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Has anybody else noticed a significant jump in the number of small or insignificant edits occuring since the kick-off of the birthday festivities?

I'm personally rolling back those that are truly insignficant (rephrasing only for gramatical preference rather than correcting incorrect structures) and allowing those that correct spelling. But even those are small, single letter changes, and under any other situation I doubt they'd even have bothered.

How are we filtering those that are worthwhile for counting towards the various criteria involved in the awards offered for this celebration?

UPDATE edits I'm referring to: Here was one I rolled back, mostly. The grammatical nit-picking was rather annoying. I tend to write in a particular grammatical form that's not popular with Microsoft Word grammar check, and apparently with some others. College professors always complained too. It was worded and (usually) spelled correctly, it just wasn't what they thought of as good writing. However, as I had other edits to make to the answer, I rolled back all the changes and made the one spelling correction myself as part of other edits.

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  • I was under the impression our judges would be checking each user
    – Simon Sheehan
    Commented Sep 2, 2011 at 17:13
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    some links to the ones you've rolled back?
    – Sathyajith Bhat Mod
    Commented Sep 2, 2011 at 17:33
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    While I understand where you're coming from, I don't think rolling back helpful edits does the site any good. It would be much more productive to just give us a list of those users who've been doing this at length, and if necessary, a moderator can contact them to ask them to avoid trivial edits. Rolling back edits - even trivial ones - just because they weren't necessary seems like a waste of time.
    – nhinkle Mod
    Commented Sep 2, 2011 at 18:05
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    I have looked at your activity and do not see any edits today or yesterday that are rollbacks...unless that doesn't show
    – Simon Sheehan
    Commented Sep 2, 2011 at 18:18
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    As @nhinkle said, it's not only a waste of time on your side — if the edits are so bad, then they shouldn't have been approved in the first place. Rolling them back doesn't help anybody.
    – slhck
    Commented Sep 2, 2011 at 19:01
  • I think a bigger issue is the huge amount of inappropriate edits/tag wiki additions that some people have been approving. I hate to say it, but it seems like a lot of users are simply clicking the "Approve" button without giving any of these suggested edits a second thought.
    – Breakthrough
    Commented Sep 2, 2011 at 19:19
  • I've rolled back one today and probably two others in the last 4 days.
    – music2myear
    Commented Sep 2, 2011 at 19:30
  • Please link us too these rollbacks
    – Simon Sheehan
    Commented Sep 2, 2011 at 19:51
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    Never a good sign when the edit comment is "grammer"....
    – Pops
    Commented Sep 2, 2011 at 21:10
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    For what it's worth, I do editing here in occasional bursts/sprees. I came back for a new one earlier this week, and discovered the SU anniversary announcement on the main page shortly after I started. Now I am working just a little harder than I might have otherwise, which is better for the site (in my opinion). Now that my bias is in the open: I have no problem with people editing just for the contest, because the truly trivial edits get blocked by the system anyhow. Yes, lazy approval can be a problem, but that means we need to fix approver behavior, not discourage editing.
    – Pops
    Commented Sep 2, 2011 at 21:16

2 Answers 2

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I think the issue here is people over-approving edits that should never be approved in the first place. I think we can all agree with you, that certain edits (e.g. changes to grammatical form of sentences) should be rejected (although it depends on the severity of the changes - common sense should be used here).

Spelling and content changes should, in my opinion, be approved (if correct), regardless of the number of changes. If there is a literal spelling error (and not one due to localization, e.g. colour vs. color), then the change should be valid (as you agree with).

I support your decision to roll back these various edits, as we do not want to award the users of the community that these edits are "commonplace" and "acceptable". At the end of the day, common sense reigns king, and I see no fault in yours here.

Copying and pasting someone's post into MS Word, to find a bunch of green underlined sentences is not a reason to edit a post.

Also, one last point: There are two people to place the blame on here - the person who made the edit, and the person that approved it (if applicable). We should be monitoring both of these parts of the community, especially since I've noticed a lot of blatantly wrong tag edits be approved by someone.

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Read Do we care about edit flooding? Should we be doing anything? which explains this topic.

As for the relevancy to the birthday celebration, people are losing their focus into cleaning the house...

Sure, cleaning house is great, but focus most of all on getting new content and new users into shape!

— Jeff Atwood on "What aspect of Superuser needs the most attention?"

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