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I have a quick question as to how the timing works in the new edit suggestion feature.

If a user suggests an edit, which I then improve on, then both edits go in to the edit history; as far as I can tell then doing an improvement is functionally the same as doing "approve" followed by doing my own edit. My question is: what is the time stamp on the first edit: is it the time of the suggestion or the time of the improvement? My reason for asking is to do with what counts towards making a question CW.

In short: if I'm worried about questions prematurely becoming CW, I would think that my best strategy would be to reject the edit and then edit it myself. Now, this isn't so nice to the person who originally suggested the edit since they don't get their 2 reputation points and they don't get their name in the edit history, so I would like to be told that as far as making a post CW is concerned then "edit - improve" and "edit - accept - re-edit (quickly)" and "edit - reject - edit" have the same effect so that I don't have to balance being nice to the editor with being nice to the original poster.

So, what is the current situation with regards to this?

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1 Answer 1

I think the submitted edit has to be visible as is, because otherwise the original editor has something they neither wrote nor approved attributed to them. One could go down the route of having a "compound" edit, which is made up of both the original edit and the improvement edit, but this seems to add a fair bit of complexity.

I think you shouldn't be too worried about the 10 edit limit because it is rarely breached. I wonder if it has ever happened on tex.sx? If there is a significant change in the distribution of edits per post as a result of this, perhaps the limits should be increased?

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10 edits is only the limit for author edits. When it comes to other users editing a post, it only takes 5 separate users to convert a post to Community Wiki. With the improve function attributing to two separate users, that does actually significantly push the post towards the CW barrier. –  Grace Note Feb 28 '11 at 14:03
In the "reject - re-edit" version of the cycle then the submitted edit isn't visible and there's nothing attributed to the original editor (the reviewer's name goes on the edit). But I agree that it's not an ideal situation to have this. I don't think that we have yet reached the 10 edits on tex.SX, but it feels as though this feature potentially brings it a whole lot nearer. –  Loop Space Feb 28 '11 at 14:33
@Grace: Ah! I thought that other editors counted towards the 10 edit limit. Thanks for the correction - I should probably change this answer now. –  Charles Stewart Feb 28 '11 at 14:40

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