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Every other community is happy to accept minor edits to grammar and wording that clarify questions (and often improve keywords). WPSE is the only community that regularly rejects my edits, and it's mostly mods overriding the community process.

Why is there so much power-tripping in WPSE when it doesn't exist elsewhere? Can we let users review edit suggestions?

90% of my edits are accepted in other communities... c'mon folks.

Flashback: Do WPSE editing guidelines align with the rest of Stack Exchange?

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    I'm now suspended from making edit suggestions for 7 days...no reason whatsoever, just a slew of my suggestions rejected at the same time (obviously by a mod) and then I'm suspended for trying to help? Why is the WordPress community like this? Commented Aug 24, 2022 at 11:37
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    None of you recent rejections came from a mod.
    – fuxia Mod
    Commented Aug 24, 2022 at 15:20
  • Thanks for confirming @fuxia ... which high-rep Automattic employees want to confess to ganging up against me on WPSE to mass-flag my edits? Commented Aug 24, 2022 at 15:22
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    Looking through your edit history, they are very much minor edits but edits that should have probably been approved. The vote threshold only needs 2/3 people to reject for an edit to not go through.
    – Howdy_McGee Mod
    Commented Aug 24, 2022 at 15:22
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    Automattic doesn't employ anybody to operate here, the closest they ever had was me who was already active when I was hired, and still active when I left. Infact they were a pain in the arse particularly around WooCommerce, and never offered any support.
    – Tom J Nowell Mod
    Commented Aug 25, 2022 at 17:18

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I can't speak for all the reviews nor how anyone else conducts editing review here or elsewhere, but for the ones I personally denied, some appeared to me to be subjective improvements. I was unable to definitively assert that the modification was an objective improvement on the question's title rather than rephrasing the information which was already there without making it especially more interpretable or descriptive of the question's content.

In two cases, at the time I was reviewing the edit the associated question was closed. In that context I performed the review on the criteria that any modifications would work towards addressing the reason for closure.

I would perform the review in the same fashion for any edit on any SE site, but I will admit that in instances such as these perhaps I've misinterpreted the guidance on editing review, in which case I would be happy to review any resources on editing guidelines! I definitely err towards the conservative in review tasks, but I would very much like to improve upon my approach if at all possible.

Addendum: On Title-Only Edits

On further reflection, I think that my review decisions in the context of seemingly subjective title edits have a lot to do with whether or not the edit consists solely of modifying the title. If the body of a post is modified or the tags corrected there's more to go on regarding whether or not an edit as a whole objectively improves a question - a title modification which I cannot confidently determine to offer an improvement is unlikely to be a factor in how I vote in that case.

But when the only edit is the title alone, then my vote on the edit is entirely determined by testing the changes to a few words against my understanding of "substantive improvement."

I think that determining the impact and appropriateness of a single change may arguably be more difficult than assessing the collective effect of multiple changes, which may play a role in minor edits seemingly receiving more volatile review outcomes across the SE sites.

Which, again, does not mean that I would assert that my interpretation of or contribution to edit reviews is absolutely in-line with the mechanism's intent or guidelines, but I wanted to share that reflection on my thought process. I will certainly read up on the guidelines and advice to try and find where I might need to course-correct.

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  • I appreciate your response and respect you for explaining in detail your thinking. That said, I feel there is a level of pedanticism and one-upmanship in the WordPress community that goes beyond even WPSE, and it's a culture I've criticized for years, but that I've probably been guilty of in the past too. I feel like a better bar for approving edits is simply "does this edit even mildly improve clarity on this page?" rather than seeking to deny strangers 2 fake internet karma points. Commented Aug 25, 2022 at 10:18
  • not sure how you can one-up edits, unless all your edits were rejected in favor of the reviewer leaving what they thought was a superior edit. The other thing to factor in is that people can and do engage in behaviour designed to game the system. E.g. why change 5 words in 1 edit when you can change 1 word in 5 edits to get the badge faster? People can and do collect badges and tweak their behaviour to shortcut their way there, so blindly accepting all edits no matter how small has consequences and adds unintended perverse incentives (not that this is what is happening to you)
    – Tom J Nowell Mod
    Commented Aug 26, 2022 at 12:28

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