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allquixotic
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Very minor edits are often frowned upon because they don't do "enough", but as long as they improve the post somewhat, I never understood why they are problematic for anything but the most significant posts on the site.

The biggest gripe people tend to have is when a post is riddled with severe problems, and someone takes time to submit an edit suggestion, but only fixes 1% of the problems. Hey, if you're going to help, can you at least apply your help to the entire post? Even if that only means cleaning up grammar and markdown throughout the post, that's still a whole lot better than fixing one typo when there are 18 more typos and 4 markdown issues remaining, to say nothing of content problems.

On the flip side: like Wikipedia, we tend to care about and curate our famous/well-known posts, and we care a lot when anything happens to them -- kinda like a "soft" protection on a Wikipedia article. I could see someone justifying to reject an edit as "Too Minor" if someone tries to edit a very popular question or answer with just a small one-character fix. For one thing, it replaces the OP's profile link next to the question/answer with the guy who edited it most recently.

My guidelines would be to accept the edit, if you can answer "Yes" to all of the following:

  • Does the edit suggestion objectively improve the post's quality, without interfering with the OP's intended meaning?
  • Is the post being edited fairly obscure (i.e., less than 20 upvotes), OR a Community Wiki, OR is the edit very substantial?

If you answer "Yes" to the first one, and "yes" to at least one of the disjuncts in the second bullet, you're good to go for accepting the edit.

If one person is repeatedly flooding the edit queue with bad edits (incorrect edits, or edits that are way too minor) and it's interfering with the front page, mods may superping them to ask them to slow down.

allquixotic
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