Letting alone special cases, such as previously agreed retagging - is serial editing acceptable in general?

First of all, I have a prejudice against serial editing at all. For a close watcher of couple tags, it disturbs me, when many questions gets bubbling up in numbers. It takes time to review them. Also, I have a strong belief that editing should be only supplementary, but by no means the main occupation of the participant. If someone has no knowledge to answer, they shouldn't edit anything at all.

I have a feeling that edits should be occasional, not planned. The scenario is "I come across this question, in the area I have some experience, and I feel I can contribute a bit", not "Today I'll edit 50 questions just for sake of it!". It looks to me as people jumps to editing craze just out of nothing to do. And the outcome of such campaigns is from none to harmful.

So, the question is: is serial editing frowned upon in general, especially for insignificant make-up cleanings?

Good edits are good. Bad edits are bad. –  Michael Petrotta Jun 5 at 4:35
@MichaelPetrotta so, you have seen, say, ten edits in five minutes from the same user, all of which are good? Would it be too much to ask you for a proof? –  Your Common Sense Jun 5 at 4:59
The burden of proof is rather on you than me, don't you think? –  Michael Petrotta Jun 5 at 5:01
@YourCommonSense: Surely, then, your question would be not whether serial editing is acceptable or not in general, but rather whether such behavior encourages bad edits? –  icktoofay Jun 5 at 5:01
@MichaelPetrotta I've got your point. It's hard to expect anything else on meta. –  Your Common Sense Jun 5 at 5:02
There was an interesting example a couple of weeks ago, where somebody was fixing tags on lots of posts that were partly several years old. I forgot the tag name, but there are two very similar looking tags (one the plural of the other) that have completely different definitions. This user was looking for posts that had the wrong one of these two tags, and fixed them. Which seemed perfectly legitimate and possibly useful, but there were a lot of them in a short time period. –  Reto Koradi Jun 5 at 5:41
"Also, I have a strong belief that editing should be only supplementary, but by no means main occupation of the participant." Indeed - and I can think of some offenders who do nothing but spam the front page with trivial changes. But this idea extends in general - site maintenance should only be a minor part of one's role, otherwise there's a very real risk of losing perspective. –  Chris Stratton Jun 5 at 14:41
Editing is a perfectly legitimate function for any user to be performing, even those <2K users. One can be looking at a question which is outside of one's expertise, see the question (or answer) has butchered the English language and feel compelled to correct the post. On the serial re-tagging edit, I am more inclined to agree with you when it comes to tags. I often reject edits that are only minor retags. One case where it is permissible is when a new tag is created which might be relevant for existing questions. In that case, re-tagging multiple questions makes sense. –  demongolem Jun 5 at 14:43
all of you. All of you are terrible and should be ashamed. Edit 15 questions as penance. -- Shog9. –  Behaviour Aug 30 at 20:04

5 Answers 5

Is serial editing acceptable in general? In theory, yes. In practice, no.

In theory, it's possible to make a lot of good edits in a short time. You already identified the only problem with that, it bumps a lot of old questions and drives new content off the front page. When there is a tag cleanup, we're always told to be mindful of that.

In practice, I don't see people make a lot of good edits in a short time. What I see in the Suggested Edits review queue are serial minor edits. People who remove only "thanks" from a post, but leave all the other problems in place. Or who make dubious re-tags. I've even once seen one of those serial re-taggers slap a tag on a question that had a clear "DO NOT USE THIS TAG" in its tag wiki excerpt!

So in general, I'll say serial editing is bad. An editor should be paying attention to what (s)he is editing, even if it's a simple re-tag. And I've yet to see a serial editor do that.

I can say that I have done serial edits on questions with "thanks" at the bottom before. I found that those posts usually have other issues too, typically they lack code formatting, in many cases have spelling and other grammatical errors, and sometimes sloppy formatting (huge wall of text). I always fix all errors I see in posts. Edits just removing thanks from posts should be rejected as too minor, or improved to fix other issues. –  Nate Jun 5 at 14:52
@Nate users with over 2k rep can just go ahead and make their incomplete edits without being reviewed. –  Kate Gregory Jun 5 at 20:49
@KateGregory Do you see lots of 2k+ rep users making these bad edits? I'd expect most people that hit 2k (and get no reputation from edits anymore) to be making sensible edits, fixing all issues. Since they are no longer rep hunting. –  Nate Jun 5 at 21:02
@Nate They could still be trying to get tag badges, by adding tags to questions to which they have upvoted answers. –  S.L. Barth Jun 5 at 21:56
Seems to me that the real problem is that the front page is sorted in such a fashion that editing a question pushes it upwards. Can't see any reason why that should be the case. –  Carson63000 Jun 5 at 23:27
@Carson63000: In a recent discussion about minor edits, it was suggested that there could be an option to mark edits as minor, and those minor edits would not push the question to the top. I really liked that idea. –  Reto Koradi Jun 6 at 4:52
@RetoKoradi agreed that sounds like an excellent idea –  Carson63000 Jun 6 at 4:53
The bad thing is not really the serial editing, the bad thing is the robo approving of those... –  PlasmaHH Jun 6 at 13:26

Edits can be good, bad, radical, minor, comprehensive, incomplete or some combination of these. Mostly the results are quality improvements, thanks to the review process and the experience of many users. Quantity/speed here has very little to do with quality. You focused on minor (insignificant) so of course that is frowned upon in general. It however has nothing in particular to do with Serial editing in general where, again, some are good and some bad.


I occasionally generate an ad hoc review queue for myself. It gives me something to do. For example, I’ve spent some time removing posts which have titles beginning with “Q:”, or posts which use the name of a porn site as an example domain, or other such issues.

Three points:

  1. I always read the full thing when I edit, and try to address not only the issue that brought me to the post, but also all others that I see (and I’ll see most of ’em, because I’m a good editor and a compulsive proofreader).

  2. I have sufficient rep that my edits go through immediately. This means that (a) I’m not taking up anyone else’s time reviewing my edits, and (b) no one has cause to doubt my motives (I have never edited for rep; I have never done anything for rep).

  3. Such reviews of mine are rarely concentrated within a tag, so I won’t be distracting people who are watching any given tag (and the homepage of SO moves far too fast for any one person to influence it noticeably).

I use a custom-made review queue based on API, rather than Data Explorer. The advantage is that I get real-time data and can focus on recently active questions, thus reducing front-page bumping (this is more relevant on sites other than SO). In case you are interested, see Review+Edit page on Stack Apps. –  Behaviour Aug 30 at 20:09

Some serial editing is ok, but in general if I have an editing project to do to clean something up, I do it in batches of half-a-dozen or so, so that the front page isn't filled up with my edits. A little common sense goes a long way.

Having said that, what would really help here if there was a way to mark an edit as minor so that it doesn't appear on the front page, as per this feature-request.

it can be simply abused. –  Your Common Sense Jun 12 at 16:02

is serial editing frowned upon in general? Especially for insignificant make-up cleanings?

I think so. I'm not completely sure how many users actually do this, and I can only assume the reason that they would do it is to gain badges...?

Personally, I only ever edit questions when I can see that there is A) a typo, which I edit to improve the overall quality of the site, B) code formatting, which I edit because I can't stand blocks of code that aren't in unformatted blocks and C) to add or remove a tag, because I think it might improve the questions chance of getting an answer.

I would never log into the site and tell myself I was going to edit 50 posts today for the sake of it. That being said, approving Suggested Edits is a different story and I often will slog through a few of them in the review queue if I'm bored, but in that case I expect that people will edit for similar reasons to me.

I have seen the odd occasion where the same user will continue to pop up, doing the same thing through multiple posts, e.g. removing "Thanks!" or adding a tag. My guess is that these people would be a smaller percentage of users overall, but to answer your question, I think I would frown upon it but you'll always get users like this in any community. They'll get over it and stop doing it sooner or later.

I think the thing to note here is that presently SO provides rewards which entice users to edit who otherwise might not. It could, instead (or in addition) provide a stick to discourage serial edits, especially those of low quality. -- The aim here isn't just to identify a common problem, but to see if there is a way to drive behavior to a better place. –  Conspicuous Compiler Jun 5 at 19:55
I can see myself in your position when I were a new user. But after using the site extensively and visiting meta regularly, I come to view serial editing as a normal activity when the editor is doing his/her job right. SO has become too big that there are a lot of editing work to be done. –  nhahtdh Jun 12 at 15:59

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