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As you can see I just hit 2K, meaning I get access to the suggested edits review queue. As I enjoy improving the website, I jumped at the opportunity. However I spotted a trend in the first couple of days:

There seems to be an anonymous user suggesting lots of edits to older questions to "Improve readability and remove unnecessary text:"

Example 1

Example 2

(could only find 2 examples this morning, but there are a fair few every day I've checked)

As I'm not that experienced with the review queue yet, and I can't find a solid guide for these situations, I mostly skip these.

Does the meta community have any idea how best to handle these? In my opinion, since these questions are fairly old and mostly low traffic/abandoned, I would think these edits are fairly redundant. But they are not necessarily bad edits, be it a bit harsh sometimes.

Related question 1, related question 2

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  • "There seems to be an anonymous user" it just means it's a user without an account. It might be more than one person. I think you also get the same if an existing user made the edits but deleted their account before they were approved. So, it might have been a single person who went and changed a bunch of questions (assuming it's more than these two), or it might be completely different people. – VLAZ Jan 30 '20 at 9:53
  • 1
    Anyway, the edits seem solid - they clarify the content and make the questions easier to discover, read, and understand. I fail to see the problem here. – VLAZ Jan 30 '20 at 9:54
  • @VLAZ Agreed. I think the biggest problem I have with most of these is that they often significantly edit the title, often leaving out keywords that people would search for (like sendkeys in the first one) – Plutian Jan 30 '20 at 10:00
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    sendkeys is added as a tag, so it should still be discoverable. – VLAZ Jan 30 '20 at 10:49
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That a question is old does not mean it should not be edited. If the edits are good and improve the post, (and if the post is not otherwise unsalvageable) then it's all good.

That an unregistered user is making these suggestions does not change things.

The example edits you point to seem perfectly valid. The best way to handle these edits is to click "Approve" and move on to the next one.

  • In this example, they added a relevant tag (), and they appropriately removed it from the title while making the intent of the question much clearer. (A tag does not belong to in the title unless it can be read naturally).

    They fixed spelling and grammar in the post and removed the typical "please help thanks" noise.

  • The second case is very similar (removed noise, grammar/spelling improvements), but they didn't edit the post tags, and they tidied up the code format without invalidating the question.

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  • Thank you for your clear answer. That a question is old does not mean it should not be edited was one of my main concerns. I agree that it doesn't change if it is an unregistered user, but I thought it worth mentioning anyway. – Plutian Jan 30 '20 at 10:21
  • "perfectly valid" is understatement:) In this particular case both edits look of way higher quality than average edits - I suspect that "anonymous" user(s) in this case are actually some frequent user/editor of SO who happen to not sign in... Does not matter for how one should review, just observation. – Alexei Levenkov Jan 30 '20 at 23:07

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