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

I refreshed my SU page and it went PINK.

As I count, there are 15 questions on the main SU view with nK views. Is this just the luck of the draw or did some bot find us?

UPDATE: There are 16 now, and Tom Wijisman is the name showing last edit on each. Is this maybe just the freaky funny result of some maintenance?

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The user - Tom - appears to have gone on an editing spree which has flooded the home page with old questions.

Ideally edits should be done one or two at a time to avoid this, but (and I haven't checked the edits) in some cases it might be better to do a whole load to get rid of potentially harmful link (for example) and take the hit of a skewed home page.

Once the edit spree is over the page will settle down to normal activity.

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  • Do we know why its only high view questions?
    – nopcorn
    Commented Aug 10, 2011 at 21:30
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    @MaxMackie - you'd have to ask Tom. He's not a mod or employee, just a relatively high rep user.
    – ChrisF
    Commented Aug 10, 2011 at 21:34
  • Seems to be a spree of editing Question titles... rephrasing them as, well, Questions.
    – Windos
    Commented Aug 10, 2011 at 21:42
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    @MaxMackie: I'm giving the top viewed questions better titles so that they represent actual proper questions rather than thrown together words, ranging from 413k to 32k views. As I want to limit the flood and getting bored I've stopped, a large part of the total views has been handled which make the titles stand out much better on Google and the site itself. I will look into scheduling future mass edits in a X questions / list way in the future with X a rather small number, or perhaps they should consider handing me a fork so I don't bump the front page...
    – Tamara Wijsman
    Commented Aug 10, 2011 at 21:43
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    Certainly made the entire homepage look like a chum machine with spam and the kind of titles you see on low quality sites. @tom
    – random Mod
    Commented Aug 10, 2011 at 21:50
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    @random: That's how the system works, it doesn't display me any warning whatsoever. Also, consider the following: If I were to do randomized maintenance; I would also flood the front page, so you want us to do no maintenance at all? Really, that will have a negative impact on the site in the long run. If you think a title is of low quality, you are free to improve it. If you think all questions are that way, feel free to start a meta question to get to a standard for titles so that prolific editors have a guideline...
    – Tamara Wijsman
    Commented Aug 10, 2011 at 21:56
  • @Tom, thanks for the edits. I fully support the effort and let me know if you're going to do it again and we can split the load.
    – nopcorn
    Commented Aug 10, 2011 at 21:58
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    @MaxMackie: I'm going to wait until the other meta question I seem to have skipped gets an accepted / official / highly upvoted response, if it gets one. From there on I'll see what I have to do in order to not hit the toes of fellow community members; remember, all I want is to do good so this shouldn't naturally react in comments that say the exact opposite. If it's not titles, it's tags; if it's not tags, it's improving posts with pictures; and so on...
    – Tamara Wijsman
    Commented Aug 10, 2011 at 22:02
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    For what it's worth, I think it's absolutely important to make our most viewed questions better and more representative. In the long run, I don't care about the front page as much as about the quality of the site. Go @Tom!
    – slhck
    Commented Aug 10, 2011 at 22:05
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    There must be an election going on somewhere
    – random Mod
    Commented Aug 11, 2011 at 12:57
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    I just wanted to throw in my (Meta question)[meta.stackexchange.com/questions/102012/… : IMHO, editing old questions is something that NEEDS to be done for the good of the site... and if a user is willing to give up their time and do loads, fair enough - however, for small edits like this, there needs to be a way to stop it from going to the top, as I agree it really look spammy on the front page. At the moment, it is a necessary evil!
    – William Hilsum
    Commented Aug 24, 2011 at 9:20

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