24

In review I came across a suggested edit for this question:

The proposed edit ain't bad, just a tiny bit of grammar and wording cleanup. It's not a totally trivial edit, but not a major copy-edit job either. (As I said, mediocre.)

I would have clicked "approve" except I really don't want to encourage the laziness and sloppiness of including the edit message, "Improve blah blah."

I found this related meta post:

But, I haven't seen a post that discussed acceptable edits with a sloppy or uninformative edit message.

What are the options? What do you think should be done in such a case?

1
  • 5
    I had to check whether you said "blah blah" or the edit message. Commented Dec 22, 2016 at 2:56

1 Answer 1

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Assuming that the suggested edit is good enough that you would consider accepting it, based on its own merits, and ignoring the comment, here’s a possible approach:

The first time you see something like this:

  1. Accept the edit (or improve it).
  2. Leave a comment for the editor asking him to write better comments.  (You can @-ping people who have (successfully) edited a post.  But you’ll have to type (or copy and paste) the user’s name, because it isn’t included in the auto-complete.  And this doesn’t work at all for users who have suggested edits that were rejected.)
  3. Make a note of the user name.

Then, when you see more low-quality edit comments coming from the same users, reject them.

2
  • Thanks for the information in Point 2. The UI for SE sites is excellent so I concluded from the lack of auto-completion that it wasn't possible to notify an editor with a comment. Commented Jan 4, 2017 at 10:51
  • 1
    @AnthonyGeoghegan you may want to vote and comment on this meta proposal. Commented Jan 5, 2017 at 21:57

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