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I'm noticing quite a lot of minor "fixup" edits recently, often in questions that are many months old, or more.

My personal feeling about minor syntax/grammar/layout/spelling fix-ups are that they're great in recent questions, say anything up to a week old; past that, because the edit will catapult the question to the top of the main page, I feel that there's an increasingly high bar to clear in terms of how necessary an edit must be in order to justify the catapulting.

Once a question's over, say, a couple of weeks old, I'm not really interested in minor fix-ups; only substantive factual edits can justify the catapult. For the avoidance of doubt, a posting that's actually become wrong (an important link has rotted, or the author has changed their mind, or new research has invalidated the answer, or the question) is always, to my, mind, worthy of change, and I'm grateful to anyone who takes the time to help keep our content relevant; it's just the keeping it pretty that doesn't move me.

But that's just my personal viewpoint, and it may not be shared. Does anyone else have any strong feelings about this, and if so, what? Or are fix-ups an unqualified good? Or is this so unimportant that we don't need to take any kind of a view on it?

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Improvements are great! Posts are not just for the people who read new posts, they build a library of Q&A that is intended to help many people in the future. For them, clarifications and edits are valuable. It would be a disservice to this library to discourage improvements, now matter how old the post, now matter how small the improvement.

Unfortunately, the StackExchange software bumps edited posts on the frontpage. This has the side effect that edited questions tend to receive more views and more votes. Thus, old posts in a Q&A where one has written an answer can be an effective reputation-farming strategy. If a pattern emerges where users frequently make lots of extremely minor edits, and where this had an effect of gaining lots of reputation points, this could warrant moderation intervention. But I don't think that's a problem right now.

Personally, I think it would be great if it was possible to make small edits without bumping the post. But of course, it's not that easy, since bumping also helps with social control, facilitating moderation of potentially problematic edits. In any case, edits that actually improve stuff aren't a problem, only the side effects from the StackExchange software are.

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  • FAOD, I like edits that improve things, too. My question is about the tradeoff between edits vs. bumping to the top of the front page. I, too, know of no way to make edits that doesn't do that, so edit farming on old posts has the effect of resuscitating a lot of old posts. I'm asking about how people evaluate that tradeoff. Commented May 1, 2023 at 14:53
  • @MadHatter My point is that this is currently a fairly small problem, and attempts to rein in potential reputation farming would make things worse (by discouraging good-faith edits). Thus, we should do nothing for the time being. However, it could be that your perception of this problem as a moderator is very different from my perception as a user – I consciously avoid the moderation queues, rarely look at the front page, and mostly interact with the site through RSS feeds (without which I'd never have seen this meta post). Commented May 1, 2023 at 18:59
  • That is both fair and honest, and I thank you for it! (And, while I'm at it, for your participation on this site more generally.) Commented May 2, 2023 at 8:48

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