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As you can see from my rep I'm rather new to the "review suggested edits" privilege, so I'm searching for some advice.

Currently there are a lot of edit suggestions from one user, which mainly consist of converting keys to keys. Although I personally do not like this <kdb> style, I approved most of the edits I reviewed because <kdb> is implemented for some reason (i.e. the community likes it).

Now, I struggled over some edits like here where CTRL+LARROW gets edited to Ctrl+Left Arrow. It seems that @Linger will edit some more posts in the future, so I think it would be a good hint for him/her, that instead of <kbd>Left Arrow</kbd> one can use <kbd>&larr;</kbd> etc. to draw a ,,real'' arrow.

But I see no possibility to send directly a message during the review process. (Although @slhck comments here that ,,users should actually get a fair amount of feedback on their edits when they're below 2k''.)

Does this mean, I should reject those edits, writing the possible improvement as the reason why I rejected, improve this myself (this doubles the work) or just accept the edit (because most people won't care if there is a ← pictogram or not)?

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    Sounds too minor. Both the user's edits (if that's all there is to them) and your improvement. This is just personal preference.
    – Daniel Beck Mod
    Commented May 29, 2013 at 21:07
  • There still is no real notification system for rejected edits, which would come in useful in such situations. Shog9's suggestion would also make sense here.
    – slhck Mod
    Commented May 29, 2013 at 21:16

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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If <kbd> is the only thing a user is adding to a post, reject. Adding keyboard markup does not improve the post in any way—okay, it's nice to look at, but you can safely assume that a reader will know that Ctrl-K refers to an actual keyboard shortcut. And if it's "Left Arrow" or ← doesn't matter either. In fact, we've had some users confused over what ⇥ meant (the Tab character often seen in OS X).

On the other hand, if the edit fixes other things, like spelling and grammar, and adds <kbd> markup as icing on the cake, then it's okay to approve.

When a user seems to be targeting posts with keyboard shortcuts specifically, they should probably focus on tags that need more attention instead.

As there is no specific message you can send a user, you only have a few limited options:

  • Reject the edit if it is too minor. Leave a custom message. If the user has too many rejected edits, they will not be able to edit posts for a few days (7 IIRC).
  • Find a post edited by the user, and @-ping them in a comment. It'll notify them. Just ask them nicely to slow down, or invite them to chat.
  • Flag one of the posts they edited.
  • Come to Meta.

In that case, I pinged the user in chat to stop by and weigh in.

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  • Thanks for your answer! I totally agree that the pictograms are sometimes hard to dechipher (and even are ambiguous; &larr; can also mean backspace), but <kbd>Left Arrow</kdb> deemed to me as a wild mixture. In future I try to focus more on the content than on such (minor) formatting issues.
    – mpy
    Commented May 29, 2013 at 21:47
  • Might want to contact this guy. All I see from him are kbd tag edits, and I'm extremely surprised at how a 10k and even a 100k user seem to be blindly approving them all.
    – Karan
    Commented Jun 12, 2013 at 16:55

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