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I recently saw a post (a question) where the edits made were as follows (no link, do not want to single out):

  • Edit 2 (suggested, approved) was numerous but minor grammar / capitalization fixes; the question was already readable prior.
  • Edit 3 (privileged) added a missing space between two words in the title.
  • Edit 4 (suggested, approved) changed an "it's" to "its" in the title.

(The edits were made by different users). I am not active on Physics. I am active on SO. On SO these would be considered too minor. I would actually probably flag the question and point out that edit 2 and 4 should not have been approved to help spot potential robo-editors/-reviewers (these flags have, so far, been generally marked as helpful).

I do not know how Physics feels about these kinds of things though. Here, are the above edits OK? If not, is it helpful to flag them?

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    $\begingroup$ Related: meta.physics.stackexchange.com/q/4790/2451 and links therein. $\endgroup$
    – Qmechanic Mod
    Nov 15, 2014 at 20:03
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    $\begingroup$ I make and approve these sorts of edits all the time. Why would we reject a correction when accepting it is the same amount of work to a reviewer and doesn't waste the work of the editor? Rejecting it yields no improvement but accepting it does. $\endgroup$ Nov 15, 2014 at 22:25

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Grammar/spelling changes are fine. Particularly if the person editing made an effort to get all of them at once. Even if a question is readable, it's okay to edit it to fix all the remaining mistakes at once.

A single space is pretty minor, but since it's on a title it's also sort of important to get right. It just looks bad.

Poor grammar in the title for a single word, I wouldn't approve that change unless there were other things to change as well.

So I would say Edit 2 is fine, Edit 3 is okay but not great -- titles are important though and readability matters. Edit 4 I wouldn't have approved but I also don't think I would flag as too minor (I would have rejected it as too minor however).

We don't have a problem with robo-reviewers like SO does. We're a much smaller community and the people who typically do the approval are drawn from a small group of active users. So it's less about robots and more about bumping questions to the front page when there is little reason to. Which is certainly annoying, but not mission-critical to avoid.

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  • $\begingroup$ Yeah, my rule of thumb for edits is that within the first 4 or 5 times a post is edited, any edit which makes the post strictly better (even by a little bit) is okay. I think that's essentially the same thing you're saying. $\endgroup$
    – David Z
    Nov 16, 2014 at 7:24

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