Editing others' posts

Question

Gang, a comment. Every now and them we get a new member who wants to perform edits on others' posts. This is generally encouraged.

However, I'd like to opine that the edits should not be preferential. That is, if someone says, "In this game..." and editor should probably not edit it to say, "In this position..." since there's really not a material difference in the sentences. The same thing applies to punctuation edits.

Replacing notation with the snazzy new board, absolutely. That edit adds something.

I bring this up for the following reasons:

1. If an author writes something a certain way, perhaps that's how they want it. We should respect this.
2. Edits force posts back to the top. This dredges up inactive posts that probably don't warrant a re-reading. It's extra annoying when you determine that the reason the post is back to the top isn't because there was new content but that an editor removed an extraneous space after period. (I'd surely like to see a "Don't BTTT this thread" option on the edit page.)

Shall we agree that we'll limit our edits to those making clear improvements and when in doubt, leave the post as-is?

Answer 1

I think I partly disagree. While you surely take only extreme cases on which I'm bound to agree (edits for no more but spacing are too tiny¹), typos and misspellings should be fixed, and only edit suggestions are meant to have a threshold on length.

While certainly “truly minor edits that do nothing important should be discouraged”, “it's up to [SE] to decide if a post should be bumped because of a minor edit, but I see no reason to leave a post wrong specifically because you're trying to avoid bumping it”. (Gotta love how MSO already asked about it all.)

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¹ but I will change a space² to make it unbreakable if it fixes some display.
² _{^{Did I mention I sowed spaces ?}}

Answer 2

I agree that there should be a cut back on mass edits. Additionally, I've seen a lot of tags added to posts lately, that are redundant, duplicates of other tags or otherwise unneeded.