How much negative result is there to having some aggressive edit refusers?

Question

I generally don't take a strong interest in the process behind what occurs between when I suggest an edit and the edit becoming formalized. I was a bit bored today, and so I watched a little more intently the process as it occurred.

After the edit was accepted, something kinda struck me. I'm not trying to call out the specific person in question, but I'm wondering if there's some lesser issue that hasn't yet been addressed.

I don't think that some of edit checkers were unreasonable about their checks. Even an edit that introduces minor errors is easily fixed. Could the more critical checker, which has a more than 50% refusal rate, not have accepted the edit and either chosen to do nothing more or fixed it furthermore?

I don't want to call out the individual in question for purposes of sanction. On request, I will supply details about the specific instance.

Answer 1

Assuming you are talking about this edit:

This is one reason why we have majority rule in the review queues.

Looking at the review in question the edit was useful in that you saved the question from being closed as a product recommendation and so in my opinion it should have been approved as the rest of the question is not particularly poor quality.

From the other side though I personally have a very similar rejection ratio. I hate edits that are pointless grammatical changes that don't benefit anyone or similar superficial edits.

Your edit was on the borderline though. It clearly saved the question from being closed as a product recommendation, but to an extent it does conflict with the wishes of the author. He was specifically asking for a tool and you changed it to ask for a general solution instead.

I would have accepted your edit, but mainly because it essentially "does no active harm" to the question and actually prevented it from being immediately closed. I had to actually look at how you rephrased it to see that it is in fact roughly equivalent, minus the product recommendation.

I don't see any harm with a high reject ratio though. We need more people rejecting the more minor and pointless edits that do nothing more than create churn on the front page or people gaming the edit rep you get by making pointless changes to tag wikis that add no real value.

While the user who rejected your edit may certainly be more discerning, all their recent rejects seem to align well with the set of canned reject reasons that are available. Most of their recent rejections are from new users who were trying to comment on answers when they lack the reputation, perfectly fine to reject IMO.

Considering the ratios of accepted edits I'd actually be looking closer at the other users who accepted your edit and asking if they are simply accepting everything but the absolute worst edits. 1000 accepts with only 3 rejects seems a lot like robo-reviewing to me.

Answer 2

I don't think you should pay that much attention those statistics about how many edits a user has approved or rejected. When reviewing edits, it's often easier to be sure that an edit should be rejected than it is to be sure that it should be approved. For instance, on some days there are three or four attempts from the same spammer to nuke legitimate answers and replace them with spam and it takes half a second to decide to click reject for each one. This can rapidly increase the "rejected edits" count for a reviewer.

For the particular case you are talking about, in my opinion the edit should have been approved and ultimately it was. The edit approval system is basically a democracy where the majority opinion wins and generally it works well.

Answer 3

Don't look :-) Everybody was right; it was a minor edit that changed nothing in reality, so in that respect it would not have been horribly wrong to reject it.

In the Super User reality though :-) I can see exactly what you were doing "saving the question" and totally marking what you were doing clearly in the comments in killermist style.

You have got to stop "Hey, what's that edit . . ." Gratuitous music video, Stop Hey What's that sound.

Don't sweat the small stuff, and keep up the good work. Things will work out for the most part.