What is meta? ×
Meta Stack Exchange is where users like you discuss bugs, features, and support issues that affect the software powering all 128 Stack Exchange communities.

This question already has an answer here:

On gaining extra review privileges I wanted to know the rules for reviewing. There is no link from the review privilege descriptions. After some searching I found this question. It would be good if the privilege descriptions had links to that question or a better one.

As I review suggested edits I see several trivial changes (eg spelling where the meaning is obvious, white space, adding or altering quote marks, changing a URL in the text to Hyperlink) and I wonder whether I should approve them or not.

Having chosen a response then how do I find out how my response affected the outcome of a review? How do I learn whether my response was correct or at least matched the majority of other responses?

share|improve this question

marked as duplicate by gnat, Martijn Pieters, hims056, ben is uǝq backwards, Antony Jan 3 at 12:17

This question has been asked before and already has an answer. If those answers do not fully address your question, please ask a new question.

    
You can see the outcome of your review decisions here: stackoverflow.com/review/suggested-edits/history –  Matthias Jan 3 at 9:55
add comment

3 Answers 3

According to me these edits should be approved even if some reviewers may think them as too minor.

  1. Formatting in code or logcat. (removing extra white space)

    This helps other users read question properly. I seriously get annoyed when I see a question which contains unformatted logcat or code.

  2. Spelling mistakes and grammatical errors.

    Mainly, when the user might have wrote Therad instead of Thread or there is a grammatical error, and suggested edit fixes all such errors in question, I would approve that.

share|improve this answer
4  
"and suggested edit fixes all such errors in question" that is the key bit for me, so many editors see 1 or 2 fixes and approve. IMO if you're going to suggest an edit the vast majority of mistakes should be fixed. It shouldn't take 4 edits to get a post looking right. –  OGHaza Jan 3 at 10:30
1  
@OGHaza For example, a user edits a post that has 5-6 same type of grammatical error/ spelling mistakes and the editor just corrects 1-2 problems and submits it. If s/he fixes the problems, then s/he should fix all 5-6 problems. that's what I meant. –  MysticMagic Jan 3 at 10:34
1  
I'd also add a bullet for correct tagging - adding a missing tag that's crucial for exposure (like a language tag) is IMHO justified (assuming it doesn't leave other errors ignored), but adding a minor tag (like for-loop, see - meta.stackexchange.com/questions/214565/…) is pretty useless, especially when done as part of robo-editing –  Leeor Jan 3 at 10:58
    
@Leeor I agree with you. Some new users might suggest a minor edit like just one typo fix (ignoring other errors) just for 2 points. That is the reason I said, 'fixes all such errors'. –  MysticMagic Jan 3 at 11:21
add comment

My biggest tip would be: If you are unsure then hit Skip.

Another tip I'd give is if you come across a suggested edit review that you're not sure whether to approve or reject, open up that same URL in a new tab, skip the review and continue with your reviewing.

After 60 seconds or so that review will have been completed by other people so you can switch back to that tab, refresh, and you'll be able to see what action the other reviewers chose to take along with the reasons any of them chose to reject it for.

Be warned though that there are many poor reviewers out there and there is certainly a tendency for people to approve edits - If a suggested edit was rejected by 2 people and approved by 3 it's very likely that the suggested edit was of a very low quality.

You can do the same for edits you do approve/reject - do a few reviews then hit back on the browser and you can see what the other reviewer's chose to do and what the final decision was. I do this all the time to ensure that actual bad edits get rejected - if they don't then I can go to the post myself and roll back/fix the post myself.

share|improve this answer
    
+1 for suggesting skip if unsure. That at least stops us from taking a wrong decision. –  MysticMagic Jan 3 at 12:00
add comment

If you go to a review queue, you can click on the 'history' tab (e.g. here is your suggested edits history) and then revisit any review you did in the past. This way you can see how other reviewers handled the edit. For example, this review that you approved was also approved by 2 other reviewers, so the edit was accepted.

It is my experience that there is a big difference between different reviewers when an edit is considered as too minor. Personally I think that an edit should fix at least 3 typos in the question body, improve the title (by adding one or more important keywords) or add a relevant tag before I consider it substantial enough to approve. Some reviewers are more strict, but many are less strict. I guess this is something for yourself to decide where you draw the line.

share|improve this answer
add comment

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .
http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/214762/how-do-i-learn-how-to-review-on-stack-overflow/214767
meta.stackexchange.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2014-23
75285
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:PGP33DEV2G6ON7PTDDV4GFL2ZDFFRE2A
<urn:uuid:46709d6c-d004-4e25-80f1-09096ea2d85c>
2014-07-23T10:34:17Z
198.252.206.16
sha1:5T7HOZMAOSRSD77YHRDWSTZUCQCIFV2L
<urn:uuid:674f3818-7ea1-47ee-a5f8-0817e46f8a20>
http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/214762/how-do-i-learn-how-to-review-on-stack-overflow/214767
response
<urn:uuid:721f7175-8310-43fd-98ef-ecf53a544116>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-33-131-23.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2014-23
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web with URLs provided by Blekko for July 2014
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf