7

Motivated by this similar question, I've noticed a lot of edits being approved when they simply shouldn't be - in particular, for questions that are already on-hold. I've noticed this several times going through the Reopen Queue already, with questions like this one and this one.

In both cases, this was because a trivial edit was approved for each (ref, ref on that question after the question was put on hold. So in addition to the hundreds of valid questions in the queue which do need attention, this question was placed back into the queue twice after it was already put on-hold (so this one question has now been through the review queue a total of three times).


Do you think it would be worth-while to display a warning (similar to when posts are detected as possibly being spam), when approving suggested edits, for questions that are on-hold? (and emphasize to only approve non-trivial edits which might have the question actually be re-opened)

1
  • Thanks for this insight. I've edited my answer to the meta question you linked. Jun 5, 2014 at 14:02

1 Answer 1

5

From my edit to this answer:

If a question is on hold and the suggested edit does not completely resolve the reason for the question being put on hold, you should Reject the edit.

This is a guideline I added to my answer there that attempts to lay out general rules for how to decide on approving/rejecting trivial edits.

I'm not expecting most people to read my post and follow my guideline, but I'm putting it there anyway.

As for your recommendation to add some kind of warning, I think that'd be a great idea. The warning should say something like:

Approving this edit will nominate this question for reopening. Please make sure that the suggested edit you are approving will completely resolve the problem with the question that caused it to be closed.

I'm not good at web mockups, so I won't attempt to butcher up a screenshot. I'm expecting a "Continue" button in black and a "Cancel" button with a white background to be displayed beneath this lightbox notification.

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .