I frequently come across old questions/answers with small errors/mistakes (Spelling, formatting, moved link etc.) but I'm always hesitant since they get bumped to the front page for no real reason except trivial formatting. Should there be an option to edit a question/answer without bumping the post back to the front page?
Similar note, is editing answers/questions to fix outdated external links a valid edit reason? Most of the pages can be found with a quick site-specific Google.
The purpose of bumping changes to the front page is to allow for early peer review. Marking something as a trivial edit has been discussed over on mSO before and always declined.
References
In general editing is positively encouraged, we have several badges for it and other community janitorial work. Some forms of editing are frowned upon, though if you are making a substantial improvement to a post then you should be OK.
Don't worry too much about it, if it irritates sufficiently you'll get a gentle nudge in the right direction I'm sure.
Iain is correct, but on the topic of outdated links - that is perhaps the BEST reason for editing.
We can interpret poor english and suffer through unformatted answers, but answers with broken links - that's a different story.
Please, if you find a broken link, and you know a corrct link, please edit it, and perhaps include the important part of the page in a block quote.
One might also say that if you are editing old unanswered questions, bumping them to the front page by the edit isn't necessarily a "bad thing", as they will get attention which might lead to an answer.
